One of the worst mistakes we ever made was making email instantaneous. We should have built in a two-hour buffer unless you flagged the email as time-sensitive or urgent. Why is that? Because now everybody has to check their email every 10 or 15 minutes on the off chance that someone has sent them a time-sensitive email. So the burden falls on the... See more

meanwhile, email often frustrates me because there is TOO much time to polish, it feels like I can't just say what's on my mind and work things out, whatever I send feels "final" in some sense I really dislike

As mail became an enterprise utility, more and more of its collaborative function was corrupted, as signalled above. It could not be a trusted medium with functions like cc and bc in common use. There were other problems. Email was fundamentally a broadcast mechanism. Control lay in the hands of the sender. And there was no real cost to sending.... See more