February 24, 2026
Email Was an Accident
Over Christmas break, I did something unusual. For 10 days, I went offline. No LinkedIn, no Slack, no compulsive checking. Just time, quiet, and whatever came naturally.
What surprised me wasn't the silence. It was what the silence revealed. My thoughts got clearer. My anxiety dropped. Ideas came back — real ideas, not the scattered half-thoughts that usually fill the gaps between notifications. I slept better. I was more present. And somewhere around day four or five, I realized: I hadn't felt this way in years.
Then January came. I opened my laptop. And within hours, the hum returned.
I've been a software developer most of my professional life. Developers have a particular relationship with distraction — we know viscerally how expensive it is. The state of deep focus that Cal Newport calls "deep work" is where everything meaningful gets built. And we know from experience that it takes 20 minutes to find that state, and a single notification to lose it. So we develop rituals. We close Slack. We put on headphones. We protect our mornings like they're sacred.
But email was always the one we couldn't quite close. Because closing email felt irresponsible. What if something urgent came in? What if a client needed an answer? The inbox stayed open, always in a browser tab somewhere, a permanent peripheral anxiety.
After Christmas, I started asking a different question. Not "how do I manage my inbox better?" but: why is it like this in the first place?
A Side Project That Took Over the World
In 1971, a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson was looking for something interesting to do with ARPANET — the early military research network that would eventually become the internet. He combined two existing programs to allow messages to be sent between different computers on the network. He chose the @ symbol to separate the username from the machine name, essentially at random. He sent the first message between two computers sitting next to each other in his lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
When asked later what that first message said, he couldn't remember. "Entirely forgettable," he said.
When asked why he invented email, his answer was equally casual: "Mostly because it seemed like a neat idea. There was no directive to go forth and invent email."
Nobody designed email to run the world's knowledge work. It was a Tuesday afternoon side project. A neat idea. And yet by the end of the 20th century it had become the dominant coordination layer for hundreds of millions of professionals — not because anyone decided it should be, but because it was universal, free, and frictionless enough that it filled every gap that nothing else was designed to fill.
What happened next is what Cal Newport, in A World Without Email, calls the hyperactive hive mind: a mode of work where collaboration happens through a constant stream of unscheduled, ad-hoc messages, primarily via email. And Newport's key insight is that this didn't emerge from bad intentions or poor planning. It emerged because email made communication so cheap that organizations stopped investing in real coordination processes.
Before email, arranging a meeting required effort. Getting a decision made required a phone call, a scheduled conversation, some deliberate back-and-forth. That friction was annoying, but it forced clarity. People batched their questions. They thought before they wrote. They built workflows because they had to.
Email dissolved all of that. When coordination costs nothing, you stop designing coordination. "Just send an email" became the universal solvent of organizational process. And the result was an inbox that never empties, a stream that never stops, and a working life that increasingly resembles standing in a river trying to catch fish with your hands.
Why You Can't Stop Checking
Here's what I've come to understand about the compulsive checking — the inbox tab always open, the phone picked up at dinner, the Sunday evening anxiety. It isn't a personal failing. It isn't poor discipline or weak willpower.
It's rational. Given the system, it's the only reasonable response.
Every unread email is a potential open loop. A question only you can answer. A coordination thread only you can close. A client waiting, a colleague blocked, a decision deferred. The system genuinely requires your constant attention because it was never designed to function any other way. You didn't build this. You inherited it.
The Christmas break taught me something about this too. The anxiety didn't disappear because I became more disciplined. It disappeared because for 10 days, the system wasn't making demands of me. The open loops closed. The river stopped flowing. And in that stillness, I could finally think.
Something Nobody Is Talking About
Newport ends A World Without Email with a challenge that has stayed with me: "Once we understand the contours of our frustrations with knowledge work, we recognize that we have the potential to make these efforts not only massively more productive, but also massively more fulfilling and sustainable. This has to be one of the most exciting and impactful challenges that almost no one is talking about... yet."
That word — yet — is doing a lot of work.
We are, I think, at the beginning of a moment where this starts to change. Not because we've become more disciplined. Not because someone invented a better inbox. But because for the first time, the tools exist to actually question the underlying system — to ask whether humans need to be the ones catching all those fish.
That's the question I've been building toward. And it starts with understanding how we got here.
Email was an accident. The question is what we do about it now.
This is the first in a series of posts about the future of async work. Next: why every solution so far has optimized the wrong thing.