🔮 Can AI finally clean my inbox?

How technology could protect meaningful productivity

In 1954, Dwight Eisenhower articulated a truth that most of us live viscerally: “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” Long before the first email was sent, professionals struggled with this paradox—the ringing telephone, the knock on the door, the crisis meeting that devoured afternoons earmarked for deep thinking. Other people’s priorities have always had a peculiar talent for masquerading as emergencies.

Today, that masquerade has become a 24-hour, 7-day carnival. You unlock your phone to check the weather; 205 taps later, it’s lunchtime and the clouds have rolled in anyway. The digital age didn’t create the urgency trap—it has simply mechanized, digitized and exponentialized it. What was once an occasional ambush is now a constant barrage. The average worker now processes 117 emails daily while smartphones deliver 146 push notifications (181 for Gen Z). Microsoft’s telemetry reveals an interruption every two minutes during work hours. We’ve become Sisyphus, but instead of pushing one boulder uphill, we’re juggling dozens while climbing.

The productivity-industrial complex has responded with libraries of solutions: Getting Things Done, Atomic Habits, The 4-Hour Workweek. We’ve downloaded the apps, bought the planners, attended the seminars. Eat that pomodoro frog.

Yet the to-do lists get longer, the search for clarity more frantic, we’re owned by our inboxes.

Why? Because these systems demand heroic willpower precisely when our cognitive resources are most depleted. Each interruption costs 23 minutes of refocusing time—a tax we pay dozens of times daily. Email and Slack haven’t invented the phenomenon of other people’s priorities invading our day; they’ve simply made it frictionless. Without a mediator between us and the demands of others, we remain the bottleneck in our own lives.

Produced by ChatGPT under my instruction.

AI to the rescue