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

As always, I encourage you to ask the seemingly stupid question: Why should I be productive? Why should I do something faster? Why is efficiency good? Maybe you’ll get good affirming answers. Maybe you’ll discover a more complex reality that requires us to think more critically and act more circumspectly.

Where You Get More Efficient, You Get More Busy

At one point, the writer Oliver Burkeman did not have the absolutely solid lengths of time needed to write because he was “drowning in email.” In an attempt to become a more productive emailer and reduce the mental load of his inbox, Burkeman writes in his book Four Thousand Weeks, “I successfully... See more