Why email is often avoidance dressed as productivity

In my experience, email is a useful tool that is often badly misused. It provides a comforting sense of action while quietly replacing the specific, uncomfortable conversations that actually shift things.

A full inbox looks like commitment. It has volume, urgency and evidence. It can be worked at late into the evening and reported on the next morning with a certain weary pride.

What it often lacks is any of the three or four exchanges that would genuinely move the work forward.

The tells

There are recognisable patterns. The message sent at 23:40 that could have been a two-minute conversation the following morning. The thread of fourteen replies in which nobody states a position. The careful copying-in of a manager, which is not information sharing but insurance. The phrase "as per my previous email", which is rarely about the previous email.

The most telling of all is the long, immaculately reasoned message written to someone sitting eight metres away. That is not communication. That is a document being created for a future disagreement.

Why it happens

It happens because email lets people discharge the obligation without absorbing the discomfort. You can raise a concern without watching someone receive it. You can decline without hearing the reaction. You can transfer a problem to someone else's list and feel that you have dealt with it.

It’s time for ‘the monkey on the shoulder’ analogy (it’s about time I hear you say!).

At work many carry a number of annoying monkeys on their shoulders – the unwanted task, the commitment that was never going to be delivered, the tricky conversation with that difficult function or colleague. If someone can shift the annoying critter to someone else – great!

Friday afternoons can be a veritable ‘whoop’ of monkey exchanges as people try to approach their weekend monkey free.

Email also creates a defensible record, which matters enormously in organisations where people feel exposed. When trust thins, written traffic increases. You can often read the state of a relationship from the formality of the messages passing through it.

And it is genuinely absorbing. Processing a hundred messages produces a real sense of completion, which the harder task — one honest twenty-minute conversation — does not offer until afterwards.

What it costs

Decisions slow down, because nobody can be pinned to one in writing. Ambiguity survives longer, because tone is unreadable and people can fill the gap pessimistically. Small frictions harden, because they are handled at a distance. And leaders end up managing a version of events assembled from written summaries, which are always tidier than what actually happened.

There is also the simple matter of attention. An organisation whose senior people spend their thinking hours on correspondence has, in effect, decided that thinking is optional.

A practical discipline

Two rules do most of the work.

First: if a message concerns disagreement, disappointment, feedback or anything involving someone's competence or motives, it does not go in an email. It becomes a conversation, and the email afterwards records what was agreed.

Second: if a thread reaches three replies without resolution, it has failed as a medium. Pick up the phone.

Beyond that, it is worth leaders looking honestly at their own traffic. People imitate what senior people do far more reliably than what they say. A leader who answers messages at midnight has set a norm, whatever the work-life balance policy states.

The question underneath

When someone tells us they are drowning in email, we usually ask what they are not having to do while they are in there. The answer is often quite specific, and quite easy to name once someone asks.

“Email lets people discharge the obligation without absorbing the discomfort.”