I believe the title is right, but then the article goes in the wrong direction. "Email isn't the problem" was the first thing that popped into my head while sit

I believe the title is right, but then the article goes in the wrong direction. "Email isn't the problem" was the first thing that popped into my head while sitting in the audience for the pg keynote at Pycon. It's a beautiful thing that the protocol says you have an address that anyone can know, that will always receive things meant for you, that will never refuse to accept a message. That's how physical addresses work, too. What if you couldn't actually reach a person without an introduction? What if you needed to pass the gatekeepers to get something to them? How different would our world be? It's hard to even grok what decades of a different protocol would have turned the Internet into. But this is besides the point. Email isn't the problem, you are. Your mental model is wrong. Email is not a to do list unless you make it one. Email is an inbox, just like the phone and the snail mail and the comments of a stranger on the street. It's an inbox the same way suggestions from your mother are; you are allowed to ignore them! Sure, there may be repercussions, but there are repercussions to letting anyone tell you what to do, too. It is your job to triage and sort the things in your inboxes, no matter where they are, into your actual list of things to do. If you read your email and say, "I'll come back and do this later," you're doing email wrong. You have to either answer the email, delete the email, or triage it in some way to your real to do list, one you actually work off of. I use Evernote with a fairly complicated GTD-inspired system on top of it to manage this, but the tools are besides the point - I can work without them, too. The main challenge is divorcing yourself from the silly belief that you have to do what people tell you.