You cleared your inbox this morning. It's now 2 PM and there are forty-seven new messages. Half are threads you were CC'd on for unclear reasons. Some require action but don't say so clearly. Others are responses to responses that you've lost track of.
Email was supposed to make communication easier. Instead, it created an infinite queue that regenerates faster than you can process it. The inbox has become a to-do list that anyone in the world can add to without your permission.
The exhaustion isn't imagined. Studies suggest the average office worker receives over 120 emails per day. Managing this flood has become a job within the job.
The Problem People Keep Running Into
Email suffers from a fundamental design flaw: it costs nothing to send. The person writing an email experiences almost no friction. A few seconds of typing, one click, and the message is gone. The cost lands entirely on the recipient.
This asymmetry means sending always wins. When sending is easy and receiving is hard, volume increases until recipients are overwhelmed. Every person's inbox becomes a dumping ground for everyone else's thoughts, questions, and requests.
The CC field makes it worse. Adding people "just to keep them in the loop" multiplies messages exponentially. One thread with six people CC'd generates notifications for all of them on every reply.
How Modern Systems Created This
Email's problems trace back to how it evolved:
Unlimited addresses made expansion free. Unlike physical mail or phone calls, adding recipients costs nothing. This removed any incentive to be selective about who receives what.
Asynchronous communication became permanent. Unlike a phone call that ends, an email sits there until addressed. The inbox accumulates every message ever sent, creating a backlog that never clears naturally.
Reply All became the default. In most email clients, responding to everyone is just as easy as responding to one person. The polite thing became including everyone, even when most people didn't need to see the response.
Email became everything. Announcements, conversations, file sharing, task assignment, and meeting scheduling all flow through email. It became the universal channel, overloaded with purposes it wasn't designed for.
Why It Keeps Getting Worse
Email volume grows because responding creates more email. Every reply invites another reply. Every question answered leads to follow-up questions. The back-and-forth that would take two minutes in person stretches across days in email form.
People also use email as protection. Sending an email creates a record. "I sent you an email about this" becomes a defense against blame. So people email things that don't need to be emailed, just to have proof they communicated.
New tools haven't helped. Chat platforms like Slack were supposed to reduce email by handling quick conversations. Instead, they became another channel to monitor, while email volume stayed the same or increased.
And expectations have accelerated. What once could wait for a daily email check now seems to demand immediate response. The norm has shifted toward treating email like instant messaging, even though the volume makes that impossible.
How People Cope Today
People develop survival strategies. Some batch their email, checking only at designated times. Others use aggressive filtering, automatically sorting messages into folders and only reading what makes it through. A few declare "email bankruptcy," archiving everything and starting fresh.
Many have given up on inbox zero as a realistic goal. They accept that unread messages will accumulate and focus only on what seems most urgent. Important things get lost, but there's no alternative when the volume exceeds the time available.
Some organizations experiment with email-free periods or internal communication policies. These sometimes help, but the external world still sends email without pause.
Email's endless nature reflects a broader truth about modern communication: the tools that let anyone reach you have created an environment where everyone does. Until we develop better norms about what deserves an email and what doesn't, the flood will continue.