In Doomed to Repeat It Paul Ford discusses our obsession with email and to-do list apps, and he makes an interesting point about this form of communication that we all love to hate:

Is there another form of communication besides email where the acknowledged goal is to hide all of the communication? Email has evolved into a weird medium of communication where the best thing you can do is destroy it quickly, as if every email were a rabid bat attacking your face. Yet even the tragically email-burdened still have a weird love for this particular rabid, face-attacking bat. People love to tweet about how overwhelming it all is. They write articles about email bankruptcy and proclaim their inbox zero status. Email is broken, everyone agrees, but it’s the devil we know. Besides, we’re just one app away from happiness. A tremendous amount of human energy goes into propping up the technological and cultural structure of email. It’s too big to fail.

There’s also these two little gems from the article:

Doing the work, responding to the emails—these all suck. But organizing it is sweet anticipatory pleasure.

Working is hard, but thinking about working is pretty fun. The result is the software industry.

And while we’re on the topic of email, here’s something else I’ve noticed recently:

“We’re implementing a new system to reduce our reliance on email.” “Cool, how will I know there’s an update for me?” “You’ll get an email.”

— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) July 15, 2014