Email is the worst of all communication mediums. Let's just get that out there upfront. But more than just being irksome, there's growing evidence that email is a drag on our collective productivity and mental health. And as the evidence mounts, the blame falls more squarely on our own shoulders. It's time we took responsibility and closed our inboxes for good.
Let's start with what should be obvious: email is a bad way to communicate. There's the way it gives license to verbiage, turning simple conversations into an exchange of over-crafted essays. There's the way it makes every interaction private by default, so that unless you're cc'd on an exchange between colleagues you're left looking quizzical. And there are the simple functional flaws that inhibit collaboration: the way you can't add targeted comments to an email, or work collaboratively to improve the text. And the way that, if you do try to collaborate by email, you find yourself unpicking a tangle of overlapping replies and branching threads. And don't get me started on attachments.
But the costs of email go far beyond its immediate defects. Because email also infects the way we work in some really fundamental ways.
As Cal Newport shows in his bible of the anti-email movement, A World Without Email, the inbox is the arch enemy of flow. Studies show we tend to do our best work when we attain a state of deep concentration, focusing on a task for a sustained period of time. And evidence suggests that mornings are the best time of day to achieve flow. Yet what's the first thing we do when we start work each day? We check our emails. And as soon as we do, our legato vibe is lost, replaced with a frenzy of staccato tasks, until we log-off frazzled at the end of the day.
Worse, smuggled into that mental model of the inbox is a way of thinking about work that is itself profoundly flawed—a paradigm that sees work as ticking off tasks as quickly as we can.
To be productive–to convert our time and effort into value–we need to be fiercely discerning, allocating our time to things that will add the most value, and then doing those things like a craftsperson, as well as we can. Could anything jar more with this approach than ploughing through an inbox and feeling pleased when we're done? As if answering emails is in itself a thing of value. And as we're ploughing through that inbox, what are we generating? Yet more emails! It's a phenomenon Newport calls the "hyperactive hive mind"—a self-sustaining frenzy that burns us out and gets us nowhere.
There's a serious economic problem at the heart of all this. Because the wasted time adds up. In the words of Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow, you can see computers everywhere—except in the productivity statistics. Even as digital technologies have changed our lives, productivity has disappointed, and yet work has simultaneously become more intense. In Britain, the proportion of people who say they work at very high speed all or almost all the time nearly doubled between 1992 and 2017, from 17 to 31 per cent.
Sure, email isn't the only culprit. But it's sure as hell at the scene of the crime. In 2021, we're forecast to send 320bn emails a day globally—around 3,700,000 a second—and already we spend nearly three hours a day reading and answering them. Some estimates suggest we check our emails more than once every two minutes on average, and that was before lockdown. Since Covid struck, with remote work now the norm in office-based roles, our dependence on email has only increased. We spend less time having spontaneous chats with colleagues and more time engaged in that futile tennis match, bouncing emails back-and-forth.
As the evidence against email has mounted, some companies have started to take matters into their own hands. A French company, Atos Origin, saw productivity jump after it banned email. Their CEO, Thierry Breton, draws a historical analogy: "We are producing data on a massive scale that is polluting our working environments and encroaching into our personal lives. We are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organisations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the Industrial Revolution."
“Email isn't the only culprit—but it's sure as hell at the scene of the crime”
So what's better than email? Almost anything. There are now so many mediums available, each suited to a particular context, and yet many are still under-used . Do you want to generate ideas with colleagues, some of whom are introverts and some not? Use a Jamboard or a Miro canvas to capture thoughts, then synthesise the themes together. Do you want to share an idea and see what people think? Record a Loom video and get open feedback on Slack. Do you want to find and resolve areas of disagreement between two people? Do what a colleague and I have started doing: write down one side's view in a Google Doc and argue it out in the comments. Then meet up in real life to discuss.
Organisation by organisation, let's call a ceasefire on email (starting, sadly, with just internal use). Imagine for a minute how that would feel. Imagine turning up for work on Monday and… nothing. You have headspace to start the day. Maybe you'd plan your diary to make best use of the time. Maybe you'd chat with colleagues, one to one or as a group. And picture getting back to your desk to find no inbox waiting, just a question: what should I work on next?
Ok, so I'm over-selling it. We'd still have endless Zoom meetings to contend with. But at least we'd have made some progress in the battle to use technology sensibly. Think of it as a small act of collective defiance—a way to put humanity back in charge of technology, not the other way round. It might sound hopelessly idealistic—can we really break the spell of such deeply ingrained and wasteful shared habits? I guess the last 18 months suggests it's not entirely impossible. Remember the five-day-a-week commute, anyone?
