The Real Reason Your Inbox Is Overflowing

I get too much email. Way too much. And I'm hardly alone in this regard. A few months ago I read The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, and then I decided to do something about it.

As a technologist, I started there. What apps and services would help me manage the deluge of messages I receive every day? Sure, there are useful tools out there like AwayFind and Boomerang for Gmail, but I'd argue that they're Band-Aids. The core problem is us, not email. Solving this problem requires an entirely different mind-set. Rather than looking outward, why not look inward? What was I doing wrong?

No one forces us to immediately respond to any given email. We choose to reply a message. If we do that immediately to each email, then we effectively condition others to expect more of the same. It's all very Pavlovian.