We live in the age of distraction. Technology is deliberately designed to stimulate our brains and to distract us. Whether that be our phones, our laptops, our tablets. Instant messaging, social media, and a 24-hour news cycle all impact on our focus and work.
Over the last few years, I have worked very much with the “deep work” method, which means that I turn email and my phone off for a minimum of three hours a day in order to be able to focus on the underlying client work that people actually instruct us for. I am guessing that nobody instructs us purely to exchange emails with us!
Our latest tool, an AI tool, which helps manage email, has been in place for two months. In that time, I personally received 9,480 emails into my inbox, yes many will be sales emails and will be cold callers trying to make contact with us as a business. I delete hundreds of emails a day that are utterly irrelevant. I have also in that same time period though, sent 3,237 emails, which means they will be clients, my business partner, our suppliers, or the delegation of work. According to our AI software, in the last two months therefore I have saved, through utilising AI on my email inbox, around 66 hours. That is pretty impressive even if the number may be, in my view, slightly optimistic.
I wonder though, why have we become so intrinsically welded to our inboxes, and why do so many people feel the need to email rather than pick up the phone? I ask because often a quick phone call is better and it is certainly a technique that I use, as is scheduling calls with clients so that distractions of emails and instant messages are minimised.
As we look ahead to 2026, I wonder, given the prevalence now of email AI tools, whether others will start to reflect upon the futility of most of what lands in their inbox. and whether or not the age of distraction can be reversed? For now, it is a philosophical question.
If you are a client, supplier, or are working with one of us on a case, please do not hesitate to email. If you are anybody else, then take the hint, you are going to be deleted, you are wasting your time and mine, and yes, I do carve out some time each day to look at emails, but unless your email is relevant to me and my clients, it will get a two second moment of my attention in the allocated email triage window and not a second more.
Whoever invented email, really ought to go back and invent a time machine and uninvent it. It is truly awful. But by following the deep work ethos, you can minimize the damage it does to your concentration levels, your distraction levels and your day. Now that we have the AI tools, we are actually able to put all of the nonsense into a sub-folder, quickly scan and check it, and thereafter get rid of it.
What I am saying is, if you are trying to sell us something, stop! We will never buy it.
We have the privilege of thinking for a living and of solving problems, AI is a helpful new time management tool which we have adopted to ensure we can think and focus on what matters to our clients: problem solving and drafting.
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