Readwise reminded me today that Oliver Burkeman makes an insightful observation in Four Thousand Weeks:

Email is an unparalleled tool for responding rapidly to a large volume of messages – but then again, if it weren’t for email, you wouldn’t be receiving all those messages in the first place. The technologies we use to try to ‘get on top of everything’ always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the ‘everything’ of which we’re trying to get on top.

These days, it strikes me that tools like Microsoft Teams chats have added even more to the ‘everything’. Lowering the barrier to communication isn’t always helpful.

I sometimes daydream about insisting on replying to emails by letter. This is partly to slow down exchanges which need not be at the speed of light. It also increases the barrier to communication to a height which more accurately reflects the time-cost of receiving it.

Even if just internally, corporate email systems ought to have a built-in tool to estimate the time cost of any email (i.e. reading time multiplied by the approximate salary of the recipients). There ought to be a budgetary approval process for any exceptionally high-cost emails. The same ought also to apply to Microsoft Teams messages and meetings.

The observation is hardly novel, but it strikes me that we’ve become bad at accounting for people’s time.