Email is a curse. At least for many people it feels like a curse. Our inboxes fill before we can blink, we fight a never-ending and always-losing battle for inbox supremacy. The moment we win the battle, the enemy advances with another 2 or 5 or 25 emails. It doesn’t end. It won’t end. Many of us are constantly overwhelmed.

I’m convinced that one of the reasons we feel so overwhelmed by email is that we read it through an old and outdated paradigm. It used to be that mail carried a kind of significance, a kind of weight of importance. After all, I would only go through the trouble of recording thoughts on paper and placing them in an envelope and buying a stamp and putting that letter in the mail if I had something significant to communicate. Mail was important, it was the means by which I told you weighty things. I would never consider sending a letter that said nothing more than “HA!” and included a brief and silly newspaper clipping or, even worse, a notation telling you where you could find that silly clipping on your own.

Because I put effort into writing a letter and sending it to you, you in turn felt that it merited a response. So you would respond by putting your own effort into crafting a letter and you would go through the same process of stamping it and putting it in the mail. I expected no less. This was a well-established and formal procedure that consumed time, effort and resources. It mattered.

That was the paradigm before the digital age. And then email came along.