Typing the words ‘Just looping in Sarah for visibility’ feels like dropping a lead weight into a stagnant pond. I can almost hear the digital splash as the notification ripples out, hitting the phones of 14 other people who have already muted the thread. My fingers hover over the keyboard, a slight tremor of guilt passing through my wrist. I know what I am doing. I am sentencing Sarah to a minimum of 34 minutes of digital archaeology, forcing her to dig through 44 previous replies to find the one kernel of information that actually matters. I am a participant in a ritual of inefficiency that hasn’t changed since the days of dial-up modems and Netscape Navigator.

The Great Flattening: Hierarchy’s Failure

Flora R.J., a typeface designer who once spent 14 weeks perfecting the curve of a single lowercase ‘s’, calls this the ‘Great Flattening.’ Flora works out of a studio filled with 24 different types of specialized pens, each serving a purpose so specific it borders on the religious. When she looks at a 54-reply email thread, she doesn’t see a conversation; she sees a catastrophic failure of hierarchy.

“The problem with email,” Flora told me while squinting at a 0.04mm kerning error on her monitor, “is that it treats every piece of information as if it has the same weight. A request for a multi-million dollar budget approval looks exactly the same in your inbox as a notification that there are free donuts in the breakroom. It’s a flat system that demands the same cognitive load for every ping.” She’s right, of course. We spend our lives in a state of constant triage, trying to determine if the 124 notifications on our lock screen are urgent fires or just more digital ‘looping in.’

Defensive Spreading

Our chaotic use of email reflects a broader failure in organizational discipline. We have become terrified of making decisions in the open, so we hide them in the thickets of a CC list. By adding 14 people to a thread, we aren’t being transparent; we are being defensive. We are spreading the risk of a potential mistake across so many recipients that if things go sideways, no one person can be held accountable. It’s a collective shrug disguised as a collaboration. This creates a culture of ‘Cover Your Assets’ rather than a culture of ‘Get Things Done.’

Think about the sheer amount of time wasted on the ‘Reply All’ button. If 24 people spend 4 minutes reading a thread that only required 2 people’s attention, we’ve just burned over an hour of collective productivity. Multiply that by the 44 threads most of us are involved in at any given time, and you begin to see why everyone feels like they are working 14-hour days while accomplishing nothing. We are drowning in the noise of our own making.

We refuse to define our tools. We treat the inbox as a dumping ground because it’s the path of least resistance. It takes effort to pause and realize that a specific interaction requires a more specialized approach. For instance, if you were trying to navigate the complex layout of a major wildlife park, you wouldn’t rely on a messy, 44-page email chain of directions; you would use a dedicated tool like the Zoo Guide to find exactly where you need to go without the clutter. This is the difference between general-purpose chaos and intentional, curated information. Yet, in our professional lives, we continue to use the ‘confusing napkins’ of the inbox to build our empires.

Flora R.J. often argues that the fonts we use in these threads even contribute to the exhaustion. “The default sans-serifs of most email clients are designed for legibility at high speeds,” she explains, “which sounds good until you realize they encourage skim-reading. We skim the very things we should be analyzing.” I find myself doing this constantly. I scroll through 14 unread messages, catching snippets of phrases like ‘moving forward’ and ‘next steps,’ without actually processing the nuance of the request. I am replying to the shadow of the message, not the message itself.

My Pinterest shelf eventually fell down at 4:44 AM on a Tuesday, scattering a collection of vintage paperbacks across the floor. The sound was a literal wake-up call. I had tried to force a tool (the screwdriver) and a material (the wood glue) to do something they weren’t engineered for, and gravity eventually won. Our email habits are currently defying gravity, held up only by the sheer willpower of overworked employees who spend their evenings ‘catching up’ on threads they should never have been on in the first place. But the collapse is coming. You can see it in the rising rates of burnout and the 1204 unread messages that haunt the periphery of our vision.

We need to rediscover the art of the ‘No.’ Not just saying no to meetings, but saying no to the platform. ‘This is too important for email’ should be a standard phrase in every office. ‘Let’s move this to a documentation tool’ should be a celebrated move. We have to stop treating our inbox as a badge of honor. Having an empty inbox doesn’t mean you’re productive; it just means you’re good at sorting mail. It’s time we started being good at doing work instead.

I still see Flora occasionally at the coffee shop near her studio. She’s usually sketching some new character, obsessed with the 0.04mm of space between a ‘t’ and an ‘h.’ She seems remarkably calm for someone in such a high-precision field. When I asked her how she handles her own email, she laughed. “I don’t,” she said. “If it’s important, they’ll call. If it’s urgent, they’ll come to the studio. If it’s an email, it’s just a suggestion.” It’s a radical stance, and one I’m not quite brave enough to adopt yet. I still find myself opening my laptop at 10:44 PM, drawn like a moth to the glow of the ‘Compose’ button.

But I am trying. I have started deleting threads that have gone past 24 replies without a resolution. I have started removing myself from CC lists that don’t require my input. It’s a slow, painful process of unlearning 34 years of bad digital habits. Every time I resist the urge to ‘loop in’ another person, I feel a small sense of victory. It’s one less lead weight in the pond. It’s one more step toward a world where our tools actually serve us, rather than the other way around.

Ultimately, our refusal to move past the email-centric workflow of 1994 is a symptom of a deeper fear: the fear of focus. Email allows us to feel busy without being focused. It allows us to feel connected without being collaborative. It is the ultimate procrastinator’s paradise. If we want to build something that lasts-something more stable than my Pinterest shelf-we have to be willing to put down the butter knife and pick up the drill. We have to be willing to define what each tool is for and, more importantly, what it is not for. Until then, I’ll see you in the 474th reply of the next thread. I’ll be the one typing ‘Thanks!’ just to let you know I’m still alive in the digital dark.