Your Inbox Is a To-Do List Anyone Can Write On
The screen glows with that particular shade of blue that promises productivity but delivers only a low-grade headache behind the eyes. It’s been 61 minutes. A civilized lunch. And in that time, 41 new messages have colonized my inbox. A digital tide of notifications, CC’d conversations, and automated reports has washed in, and now I have to sort through the debris.
That’s the first lie we tell ourselves: “sorting.” We call it triaging, managing, processing. But it’s none of those things. It’s reacting. It’s a state of perpetual, low-stakes defense against the incursions of others. Of those 41 emails, I am the primary recipient of exactly one. One. The rest are chains where my inclusion is a form of corporate plausible deniability, a way for the sender to say “Well, he was looped in.” I am not a collaborator; I am a witness. And my afternoon will be spent bearing witness to conversations that have only a gravitational-wave-level effect on my actual work.
I used to blame the protocol. SMTP is a relic, a beautiful, simple, open system designed in an era of academic trust. It was never built to handle the weaponized bureaucracy of the modern workplace. It’s an open port to your attention, and we’ve given the address to anyone who asks for it. It has no native concept of priority, no real verification, and




















