Molly Mirhashem wrote a really good long read about how District communicators keep up with their always-buzzing inboxes.

Recently, I asked approximately 25 D.C. communications staffers and reporters how they handle the deluge. What emerged was a portrait of a media-communications ecosystem that is starkly divided. There are members of the “inbox-zero” crowd, like John Meza, communications director for Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who aim to “process” all their unread messages every time they check their email, extracting the necessary information and filing or deleting their messages throughout the day. (“It’s almost muscle memory now,” Meza says.) And then there are members of the inbox free-for-all crowd—who don’t.

“I feel terrible about it, but I’m in too deep,” says Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post, who has no system for managing his messages. (His inbox has about 125,000 emails in it, though only 341 were unread when we spoke.) He says at this point, the idea of sorting through his email is so daunting that his only real way out would be to delete everything and start fresh. “I have no good options,” he says. “I have the nuclear option and that’s it.” Dave Weigel of Bloomberg (21,000 unread) says he generally doesn’t feel bad about his laissez-faire approach, but he acknowledges that things do occasionally get lost in his inbox: “I’ve missed things, and I don’t know how to rectify that,” he says. “I’ve never come up with a good system.”

Read the whole thing over here at National Journal.