Phthursday Musings: Double Zero

Double Zero: When your personal email inbox and work email inbox are both empty.

For some of you the concept carries deep resonance. For others - especially those of you who have never had work email - the idea that this is a thing may be completely novel.

I have worked remotely for over five years. This means that my work inbox is at home. For me, emptying the inbox - and not through some kind of folder trick, but through actually dealing with everything - is the key signifier as to when my work for the week is done.

And I actually approach the home inbox much the same way. Often it’s laden with reminders of things going on for the week, bills to pay, paperwork to provide. Of course there’s a lot of other things that flow through it! But it also contains work for the week. It’s just not work work.

When my home inbox is backed up - for me that’s having, say, 25 unread emails - it can feel overwhelming. I have to set aside time on the weekend to catch up.

Double Zero, for me at least, is a critical manifestation of the modern condition. When I’m not there, and not especially close, I’m “not caught up”, which means I’m “behind”, which means stress.

This way of looking at things is complete and thorough bullshit.

Our company uses something which I’ll call ticketing software. Something needs to be done? Open a ticket. Many of you probably have the same sort of thing. They might not be called tickets. They might be called tasks, or they might have a name which comes from the name of the software itself. (For example, our company used to use software called TTP. Instead of talking about open tickets, we would talk about open TTPs.)

A couple of weeks ago in a meeting we were talking about… something. Who knows? Two very illuminating observations were made over the course of the meeting:

First, the very minute a ticket is created, it automatically becomes part of the backlog.

Second, there is an informal distinction between active backlog and everything else.

So it goes like this. Somebody opens a ticket. Immediately, by definition, the company as a whole is behind, has something which it hasn’t been able to get done yet. Now, maybe that item will sit around for a long time. Maybe it’ll leave “active” status. Maybe it’ll even leave “active” status immediately. I’ve opened tickets that were there more or less for information purposes, with no particular expectation that they’ll be addressed.

Think about how it all feels though: you’re always behind, and there’s no way to ever get ahead. It’s like the email inbox. There’s zero, but there’s no negative available. You can never do better than zero.

The issue isn’t with my workplace per se, because my workplace is common! Think about it: A police department is never going to have negative open cases, right?

Admittedly I’m wired to think in terms of lists and clearing them out. This makes me ideal for functions like clearing tickets out. But if it feels like the list grows as fast as it shrinks, this kind of wiring can backfire. If I put together a list of eight things to tackle around the house, and by the end of the week I’ve eliminated four but gained three more, even if the list is shorter, it doesn’t feel like progress. Even if something just popped up today, it’s already part of the backlog.

Then there’s the “active backlog” concept, that wink-wink acknowledgment that some things which “should get done” you know you’re never going to get to. The problem with carrying an “inactive backlog” is that a person wired to clear things off of a list will always find more things when there are inactive backlogs sitting around. For work, maybe there’s not too much to be done about this. But outside of work, the idea that there’s always more stuff following you around… that’s not healthy. That just means you stay obsessed with what’s behind you instead of what’s ahead of you.

As I write this out a lot of it seems like it’s in the “no shit, Phil” realm, but really, it’s not the sort of thing even I seem to stop and really think about. I’ve long had a problem with looking behind instead of ahead, and it’s very much tied up with this idea of clearing out the backlog.

You can’t have a negative inbox, or a negative ticket load. So how do you get past zero as a target? What’s a healthier way for me - not necessarily someone else, but for me - to think about things like email, or to-do lists, or even work?

One technique I’ve employed in the past, consciously or not, has been to stay extra busy with everything I can find. Constant motion is a way to keep yourself looking ahead instead of behind. But shouldn’t this leave behind it a wake of things to clean up? Maybe not. Maybe there’s something about not moving which tends to cause the mind to find things to add to the backlog.

I used to think in terms of people being FIFO (First In First Out) or LIFO (Last In First Out). FIFO people, in my mind, well, I guess I think they’re freaks, or maybe servers at Baskin-Robbins. I used to imagine myself as LIFO, as someone who would need to load up a list of things, and then could build off the momentum of accomplishment to blitz through the older, lesser things on the list.

Ahh, but I am probably neither FIFO nor LIFO. Whatever might my first letter be? R for Random? Z for Zany? Q for… well, how would I even pronounce QIFO anyway. Gracious. GIFO.

Anyway, if we’re talking about Double Zero, let’s talk about the real 00. The Chief:

Many years ago Chuck Klosterman, in Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs, wrote a famous essay positing that in the 1980s everyone was either a Celtics guy or a Lakers guy.

I was a Celtics guy.

The Lakers, of course, had all of the outwardly cool guys. Worthy. Magic. Uh, Kurt Rambis. And Kareem. Really, who has ever been cooler than Kareem?

The Celtics? Well. Larry Bird was a different kind of cool, right? But Kevin McHale was not cool. Danny Ainge was most definitely not cool. Bill Walton, for his cup of tea with the Celtics, I suppose he was a certain wacko kind of cool. But still.

Robert Parish, though, that dude was cool.

He was so cool he wasn’t just Zero. He was Double Zero. 00. The original.

My goofball kid and I were watching the NCAA tournament this past weekend. More precisely, I was watching, and he was… flopping around, who knows. I told him how the very first basketball game I had a recollection of watching was in 1983, when I was 6, though I guess maybe it could have been a year earlier. What I specifically remember is the old chunky CBS chyron of the score, a Finals game between the Lakers and 76ers, on the TV in my grandmother’s office that was primarily used for playing games on the TI 99/4A. I’m sure I’d seen games before that, but I specifically remember that scene.

It was that following year, when I was 7, that I have more of a sense of having actually watched the games, because I remember Magic’s baby hook against the Celtics in the Finals, and I remember rooting for the Celtics, although I can’t really piece together why that would have been, but, I do think I had an affinity for the word “Celtic”.

Anyway, Klosterman’s essay… it’s been a long time since I read it, but I remember it really nailing it. And then I also remember these weird tidbits of things. I remember the Greg Kite game. I remember the Bird steal against the Pistons. All of these fragments from the pre-Jordan era.

In this weird pastiche of memories, I think of the hard-working Dennis Johnson, the scrappy Danny Ainge, the gangly Kevin McHale, the omnipresent Larry Bird. And the man in the middle, Robert Parish, whose number wasn’t even a real number, who seemed to never smile nor exactly frown, who always drew the seemingly impossible assignment of guarding the most amazing pure scorer in the history of the game (that’s Kareem to you!) That stoic look always seemed to convey: I am here to take care of business. I mean, shit, you know Robert Parish wouldn’t leave any emails sitting around in his inbox.

Guys have worn that number since. Carmelo Anthony wears it today. But that number more belongs to one player than any other number in the history of basketball. Yeah, 23 is 23. But everybody wants to be 23, right? It’s aspirational. Even LeBron wants to be 23!

00, though? It is one hell of a statement to put on the Double Zero.

If I were going to wear an NBA jersey today, or a t-shirt designed to look like a jersey, I’d probably pick Fred Vanvleet’s Raptors jersey first, because, come on, he’s freaking Fred Vanvleet… but right behind it, I think I’d be sporting the Double Zero. Except, I’m pretty sure I’m not cool enough for that.

It’s weird thinking back because it feels like everything was all about sports for me from a young age, but I truly don’t remember a lot of the details until we get to 1985. I remember watching Villanova beat Georgetown in the NCAAs that year. I remember the Royals - Cardinals World Series, most especially the Jorge Orta play. I remember the Super Bowl Shuffle Bears really well - how could I not?

So my real memory of the time is obviously blurred with all the time that’s passed. Those Celtics - Lakers finals are as much historical imprints as they are things I distinctly remember.

Maybe part of what got the brain rolling on this was today’s news that Dick Stockton has retired. The Finals in those days, the CBS team was Stockton as play by play and the inimitable Hubie Brown as color. I swear, I can hear Stockton saying the words “fifth team foul” in my brain right now like it was yesterday.

You know what else about sports? All of that backlog shit goes out the window. Sports, school: these things end each year and then start up again. There’s a rhythm to it all. Tickets? To-do lists? Email?? There’s no fucking rhythm to an email inbox!

Maybe sports shouldn’t matter as much as they do. But maybe there’s something much bigger to be said for the rhythm they provide. If I should happen to flip on a Blazers game today and see Carmelo sporting the Double Zero, that throughline back to the Chief… that’s not just some fragment of nostalgia, that’s like tapping into the Möbius strip of life right there.

Yeah, maybe that’s the secret to busting out of that Double Zero mentality. Is not a Möbius strip, if perfectly positioned in space, itself a Double Zero? Yet unlike zero itself, at worst an endpoint, at best a midpoint to the infinite, the Double Zero of the Möbius strip gives us something truly amazing: neither end nor beginning and yet if we go forward we can get back to where we came from without having to drag a backlog with us.

Wow, now that it’s all hitting me, I truly realize: Robert Parish isn’t just the coolest, he is the Chief of time and space, the manifestation on Earth of what Listing and Möbius described as a mere structure.