Permission to Select All and Mark As Read

We are eleven days into 2026, and humanity is on track to send an average of 392.5 billion emails a day this year. Back-of-the-envelope math? Fifty for every person on the planet. 4.5 million per second. A mind-boggling sum and pace, and yet eighty-five percent of these messages are worthless, destined to live in inbox oblivion for all eternity.

AI is set to turn this snowball into a certified avalanche. As our agents begin communicating with one another, little armies of nanobots will produce more and more noise, an exponential hum of machine-to-machine correspondence that we’ll be expected to supervise while clinging to our own elusive om. Our own peace of mind.

This cacophonous, relentless assault on our attention is a tragedy of automation and free emailing. If we needed to put a $.32 stamp on every email, do you think we’d be sending so many? No, probably not. But postage is free, so people keep blasting. No, Zachary, I don’t want fifteen minutes to consider your pixel tracker for capturing family-fund dentist investors who may have sniffled at my website. Also, I don’t appreciate your passive-aggressive eighth follow-up guilting me for “wasting your time” by not responding. I don’t know you, guy. I don’t really know any dentists either. I never asked for this! (Also, apologies to any salespeople named Zachary, this isn’t about you.)

The productivity-industrial complex capitalizes on our yearning for an out-of-reach inbox zero. So we answer. Or delete. Or filter. Or delegate. We chase a state of achievement that has only gained counterproductive meaning in 2026.

Inbox zero is a lie. A bizarre one. A phrase coined as a virtue in 2007 that has lost all relevance. Comparing email management from 2007 to 2026 is already akin to comparing the reload rate of muskets to machine guns.

Daily I am bombarded by AI-Assistant after Email Manager after Project Management Suite after Productivity Command Hub. An entire industry of busywork. Problems manufactured to sell us solutions that don’t efficiently help us conquer critical-path tasks or truly navigate this digital deluge. They train us to keep up with it.

The cortisol-ridden bodies of the laptop class do not want to chase the dopamine hit of pressing send on pre-filled responses, the rapid deployment of 50-point Gantt charts, the endless sub-tasks and delegations and more and more and more all the time.

We want to find flow. Protect our time and our brains for deep work. Never open another email again if we don’t have to. AI should help winnow the grain from the husk, not keep pace with recursive momentum.

I do not think the problem to be solved is having better tools to keep pace with the volume. I think the problem is the volume itself. I think the problem is that companies are selling pickaxes for the gold rush, but the gold we are mining is largely their thin air.

All this venting aside, I do not reject AI. Far from it. I love it. I am immersed in it daily while vibe coding, debugging, updating websites, summarizing documents, triaging, building… Building all the time.

But building towards a North Star. What actually matters? What actually deserves my time? What is critical path? Where do bottlenecks exist, and how do I find autonomy and take activation into my own hands? You do not need approval. You do not even necessarily need a checklist. You certainly do not need to go back and forth on email. You need a plan, execution, review, and a revolving devlog.

More than anything, you need flow. I need flow. We need to work with AI to turn down the volume of the outside world, of middle managers, of Slack notifications, of the persistent persnickety moments of “did you get that memo?” Flow matters more for critical-path work than the satisfaction of checking a subtask off a list that was created by the aforementioned middle manager to prove they can herd cats more effectively with AI.

Discernment in critical-path work is more important than inbox zero will ever be. Do you know what you are supposed to be working on? Are you tackling it with focused flow, or are you repeating the same loops on what is still undone?

Build judiciously. Execute consistently. Review regularly. Reject the notification stimulus and response economy. AI can be our greatest ally in quieting our work lives if we let it be. Quiet does not mean unproductive. Quiet means more deep work every day instead of arming ourselves with tools designed to keep pace with noise that was never signal.

Email, as a medium for reliable human communication, is broken. It has been colonized by automation, marketing sequences, and the desperate flailing of businesses trying to break through an increasingly impermeable wall of digital noise. Two percent of cold emails will be answered. Let that sink in. On both sides of the sales equation. Lower open rates usually demand more volumetric send rather than higher quality targeting, because no one is opening anymore.

Email is still useful, but more as an archive and catch-all of receipts, itineraries, documents, and the log of all things we might have to intentionally search for in the future. If you’re not the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration or a referral from someone I’ve starred, do not expect me to see it.

The cost of sending an email is effectively zero, so we’ve collectively decided that the cost of receiving unwanted emails should also be zero.

But attention isn’t free. And neither is time.

The question should no longer be how to achieve inbox zero. The question is whether the inbox should command any of our attention at all.

If you needed permission to “select all and mark as read,” this is your permission. Choose quiet. Choose flow.