Why Cutting Email Busywork Frees People to Do Better Work

By Michal Burger, CEO, eM Client

Email has outlived just about every prediction of its demise. It is still the one place where engineers, sales teams, project managers, external partners, and executives reliably meet. It works across companies, systems, and time zones in a way few other tools do.

But for most people, the problem is no longer the volume of messages. It is everything that comes with them. Employees spend an average of 1.8 hours each day just searching for information. This means almost 25% of an employee’s working day simply vanishes.

A typical workday now includes checking multiple inboxes, switching between personal and work accounts, searching for the right version of an attachment, digging through old threads to remember what was decided, and copying details from messages into calendars or task lists. Research found that nearly half of employees regularly struggle to find documents they need. None of that is the work people were hired to do. Yet it quietly fills large parts of the day.

Over time, that background friction chips away at something harder to measure than hours on a timesheet; the mental space people need to think, create, and do careful work.

Still, when organizations try to fix productivity, they usually reach for workshops, playbooks, and personal efficiency techniques. The real constraint is not personal discipline. It’s how everyday work is structured.

When email becomes the glue holding broken workflows together

Email has slowly turned into a hand-off point between too many disconnected tools.

A conversation might start in an inbox, continue in a meeting, produce a shared document, and end with a handful of follow-ups tracked somewhere else. The tools involved rarely know anything about each other. So people fill the gaps manually. They forward messages, copy links into notes, flag emails as reminders, and build their own tracking systems on top.

This is especially visible in teams that operate across organizations or manage multiple roles. Context is scattered. Threads are split across folders and accounts. Information lives in several places at once, and none of them feel complete.

The work does not stop because of this. It just becomes heavier. Every task carries a layer of administrative effort that sits on top of the real objective.

The cost shows up in how people think, not just in how long tasks take

The biggest damage caused by email busywork is not that people lose a few minutes searching for a file. It is that their attention is constantly being reset.

Creative work, planning, and complex problem-solving depend on staying mentally immersed. But modern communication workflows pull people out of that state again and again. A quick search, a folder check, a second inbox, a calendar conflict, a missing attachment all across different platforms.

Individually, those interruptions seem trivial. Across an entire day, they fragment attention into short, shallow blocks. People remain responsive. Messages get answered. Meetings happen. But there is less space for careful thinking, fewer moments where someone can sit with a problem long enough to improve it, challenge it, or rethink it entirely.

That erosion is easy to mistake for disengagement or burnout. In many cases, it is simply the result of tools that make sustained focus harder than it needs to be.

Why most productivity advice does not work

When productivity drops, the default response is to help people manage themselves better: Inbox zero, time-blocking, new prioritization frameworks, training sessions on how to stay focused.

These approaches assume that the communication environment is neutral and that performance depends mostly on individual behavior. In reality, the environment shapes behavior long before habits do.

If work information is fragmented by design, employees must constantly rebuild context. If follow-ups and commitments fall out of conversations, people must create parallel systems to track them. If messages, schedules, and files live in separate places, workers become responsible for keeping those relationships in their heads.

No technique can remove that burden. At best, it teaches people how to cope with it.

Email is not just infrastructure anymore

One of the biggest blind spots in digital workplace planning is how central the email environment has become to daily work.

For many employees, it is where their day starts and ends. It is where priorities become visible, where decisions are documented, where coordination with internal and external partners happens, and where personal workload is shaped.

Treating email purely as technical infrastructure misses its influence on focus and work quality. A more useful question for leaders is whether their communication tools protect continuity. Can people easily see what a meeting relates to? Can follow-ups remain connected to the conversation that created them? Can context survive across devices and workdays without being rebuilt each time?

When those links disappear, the work does not disappear with them. It simply turns into manual effort.

Three shifts that actually reduce email friction

The first shift is to recognize that simply relying on Gmail or Outlook is no longer enough to reduce email busywork. For many organizations, “email” still means opening a browser and managing messages inside a basic inbox. Gmail and Outlook are treated as the full work environment, even though they are primarily access points to email services, not complete coordination workspaces. An email client is the layer where employees actually manage their day: messages, calendars, contacts, and follow-ups come together in one place.

Reducing email busywork now requires evaluating more capable email clients that go beyond basic send-and-receive functionality. As communication volume and coordination complexity grow, organizations need environments that consolidate everyday work, preserve context across conversations and actions, and increasingly use built-in AI assistance to help summarize, prioritize, and surface what matters. 

Without a more advanced email client at the center of daily workflows, employees remain responsible for stitching together information and tasks themselves, and the hidden administrative drag around email continues to grow.

The second shift is to simplify how work is structured around email. Even the best tools cannot compensate for unclear ownership, scattered shared inboxes, or informal follow-up practices. Organizations should establish consistent ways of using shared mailboxes, meeting invites, and action tracking so employees are not inventing their own systems to manage communication. 

The third shift is to reduce fragmentation outside the inbox. Email becomes heavier when projects, files, and decisions live across too many disconnected systems. Leaders should look for opportunities to standardize where information lives and how teams collaborate, so email does not have to act as a bridge between competing tools and workflows.

Together, these shifts make email less about managing communication and more about supporting real work.

Better work appears when friction fades

When teams reduce the operational drag around email, the difference is immediate. People spend less time re-orienting themselves. Commitments are clearer. Hand-offs break less often. But the most meaningful change is quieter.

Employees recover longer stretches of uninterrupted time. They can follow ideas further, test assumptions, and think through decisions without being pulled back into maintenance work every few minutes.

Creativity is not a special activity reserved for designers or strategists. It is part of how good work happens in every role. And it depends on having space to think. Email will remain a backbone of modern organizations. The opportunity is not to replace it with something new, but to stop forcing people to do so much invisible work just to make it usable.

Removing email busywork may never look like a bold productivity program. But it may be one of the most practical ways leaders can improve the quality of work their teams are able to produce.