Email (let's drop the hyphen)

You need to break that e-mail information-noodling habit and use other, healthier ways to get the same result. First, you can decide to no longer use frequent reading of e-mail as a way to change the pace; there are other and better ways to do that. Second, you can easily stay in the loop by checking e-mail only a few times a day; events rarely unf

the now ubiquitous culture of connectivity, where one is expected to read and respond to e-mails (and related communication) quickly.

The problem, of course, is that email didn’t live up to its billing as a productivity silver bullet. The quick phone call, it turns out, cannot always be replaced with a single quick message, but instead often requires dozens of ambiguous digital notes passed back and forth to replicate the interactive nature of conversation.

What if email didn’t save knowledge work but instead accidentally traded minor conveniences for a major drag on real productivity (not frantic busyness, but actual results), leading to slower economic growth over the past two decades?

If slightly increasing friction drastically reduces the requests made on your time and attention, then most of these requests are not vital to your organization’s operation in the first place; they are instead a side effect of the artificially low resistance created by digital communication tools.