Email Broke The Office Here's How To Fix It

Computer scientist Cal Newport says email overload has made us miserable – and less productive too. Does he have the solutions to a better, more sane way to work?

- Clay Skipper

A couple of years ago, I decided to liberate myself from my inbox. My personal Gmail had become unusable. For every email containing something useful, there were six from every place I’d ever swiped my credit card at. So I opened a new account, added my middle initial, and set up an auto-reply on my old Gmail that I intend to leave up until the end of time. Everyone who needs to reach me can and every spam robot can’t; I can rest easy in the serenity of being untethered to those 18,000 unread messages. Unfortunately, this inbox nirvana applies only to my personal email. No such workaround is possible for my professional inbox. There, my strategy is neither Inbox Zero nor pure anarchy, with tens of thousands left unread. I use my work inbox as a pseudo to-do list, which means leaving emails unread (26, as of this writing) and even, diabolically, adding to my own clutter by sending myself emails with reminders in the subject line. It feels like playing tennis against Serena Williams, except there are three of her and instead of tennis balls she has marketing emails.