How Email Became Work⁠↗

What changed? The continued spread of Wifi, but also the mass adoption of laptops — from work, or, in my case, for grad school — and then, of course, the smartphone. Gmail happened. Your email became a repository for bills, for endless advertisements, for eCards and alumni news. Very occasionally, there might be something interesting or novel, but most of actual, valuable interactions had been siphoned off elsewhere: to Facebook, at least at first, and then to text and Instagram.

work email might have just slowly cannibalized personal email, to the point you hardly even check it.

your to-do list, or “action items” or whatever you call it in your industry, got shifted from physical spaces (and your own head) into your inbox, and then that inbox became portable. And work’s power and pull is such that when it becomes possible to do it elsewhere — especially in a capacity that feels like tidying — it becomes probable that you’ll do it elsewhere. The inbox devours everything it comes in contact with, especially leisure time.

“A platform that was first designed to overcome the asynchronous schedules of co-workers has been transformed into its opposite,” Gregg writes. “It is now a means to demonstrate co-presence with colleagues and enhance the pace and immediacy of busy office schedules.”

Over-emailing is a symptom of job insecurity and a sign, perhaps ironically, of an organization with shit communication. People send emails to everyone — directly emailing, instead of cc’ing, or leaving them off the thread entirely — as a means of showing work and covering bases, of overcompensating for lack of trust (bestowed on them or bestowed on others).

When everyone is spending their nights filing through their inbox to ready themselves for more email-generating content during the day, to opt out of the cycle is to position yourself as lazy or less committed.

Over-emailing and email attentiveness is a version of the Slack LARPing I wrote about last year. Both share a dark heart: they’re motivated by feelings of job insecurity, which is the fault of bad leadership and national economic policy, but they’re largely enforced and amplified by our coworkers.

The woman I quoted above has become so overwhelmed with her work inbox that she’ll go months without looking at her personal inbox — which is, well, quite the metaphor.