GTD - another way to have a clean inbox

Arggh, I have spent a bunch of time arguing this point with a friend, and here is a poll on Lifehacker.  And I just saw another one over here. So please, explain to me why is everyone so obsessed with a "clean inbox?!?!?"

The GTD people have hammered the idea of a clean inbox so deep into people's brains, it seems it will never get out!

But wait, there's another way!!

I am fan of the GTD stuff, but keeping my inbox clean seems so ... pedestrian. I hate doing stuff I don't have to do, so please, someone tell me why I have to keep a clean inbox? Here's how to keep it "clean" without having to actually do the "read and archive step" which everyone seems so hung up on.

Step 1. Read unread email.
Step 2. There is NO STEP 2!!!

That's right. Read the email, and let the read vs. unread emails tell you how many new / unread emails you have in your inbox. If you learn to see an inbox with 0 unread emails, regardless of how many read emails it contains, you will see that this is exactly equivalent to archiving the messages into an archive folder, except you don't have to do the archive step.

But what about "in progress in emails" you ask?

Right. Well first of all, at least 50% emails are junk, so you just delete them - this is the same for everyone. Emails that you don't care about (the ones you were going to archive - the majority of the remainder left after deleting junk - you just leave in the box. And the ones you care about - I file them into a ToDo folder. When I get time to do some tasks, I go browse the ToDo folder and there you have it. GTD in a few less steps.

(Note: I would prefer to tag my emails, but this is not cross-platform. Every platform, from smartphones to web email recognizes folders so I just use one high level folder next to my inbox to store the ToDo list)

Just like those "clean" freaks - I have a ToDo that is not more than 10 or so emails long. But my inbox? Well thats a few years worth so it's got some 5k messages in it.

If you think about it - this is just the XP style of working. Don't do unnecessary work up front that has neglible cost savings in the future. You'll pay more to do all the book keeping than you get back in the future, and the same reason I don't sort emails - I just search them. The number of times I "go back" to something is orders of magnitude (yes, probably ony 1 in 100) less than how much mail there actually is - so why sort 100 items just to find that one item later? Right. Don't. It's wasted effort.

Thanks for listening.