There are 132 unread emails in my inbox right now, and I consider this a good email day. Not because I haven’t seen them. I’ve seen them. I just don’t have the time to deal with them. Maybe you know the feeling: a sort of low-grade hum of anxiety that never quite goes away. Like a fridge. 

It’s 2025. Email has been “broken” for at least a decade, maybe two, depending on who you ask. You’d think we’d have figured it out by now. After all, we’ve cured diseases, sent billionaires into orbit, and developed AI that can write legal contracts. But email, the single most common communication system in professional life, remains a barely controlled avalanche of requests, to-dos, FYIs, passive aggression, forgotten threads, and meeting invites with no agenda. 

And yet, we still use it. Because of course we do. It’s where work starts. It’s where decisions get made. And it’s currently where productivity quietly goes to die. 

A brief history of email 

Email wasn’t supposed to be this way. The first recognizable form of email emerged in the early 1970s, when Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer working on ARPANET, sent a message to himself across two machines. That humble test birthed a revolution. Suddenly, digital messaging wasn’t just possible, it was practical. By the ’90s, corporate networks had adopted email en masse. By the early 2000s, Outlook reigned supreme. Gmail debuted in 2004. Slack launched to the public in February 2014 promising to “kill” email. It didn’t. 

Instead, we now have both, email and Slack. Or MS Teams. And Zoom. And Asana. And, and, and… Email didn’t die, it metastasized. 

For all the new tools and bold predictions, email remains undefeated because it’s universal and asynchronous. It works across companies, platforms, departments, and continents. You don’t need an account on someone else’s internal system. You just need their address. That’s it.  

The cost of “Just one more email” 

According to a McKinsey study (yes, the one everyone cites), the average knowledge worker spends 28% of their week reading and responding to email. That’s more than a full workday every week. And that stat is from 2012. The pandemic didn’t help. Every hallway conversation became an email thread. Every “quick question” turned into five follow-ups. 

The modern inbox isn’t just a place for messages; it’s a to-do list written by other people. Your manager. Your client. Something you signed up to six months ago and forgot to cancel. If it sounds overwhelming, that’s because it is. 

We created a system where every incoming email is a potential task, meeting, decision, or problem, but we never built an actual system to manage that. So, we improvise. Some of us flag messages. Some forward them to ourselves. Some build elaborate folders. Some just leave everything unread and develop an immunity to red badge notifications. 

The result? A silent but massive loss of productivity. Not because people aren’t working, but because they’re working through noise. Every inbox is a battleground, and everyone’s fighting a different war. 

Email overload is rarely about volume alone. It’s about ambiguity. You don’t just receive messages. You receive requests, and you have to decipher them. Some are urgent. Some are vague. Some are long-winded status updates you didn’t ask for. Others are hauntingly short, like the dreaded “Can we talk?” 

And unlike Slack, which at least has presence indicators and channels, email offers no structure. It flattens context. A contract review request, a budget approval, a lunch invite, and a phishing attempt all show up in the same way. Every email is a blank canvas for someone else’s priority. 

Worse, your calendar doesn’t talk to your inbox. Your project management tool doesn’t talk to your inbox. Your inbox doesn’t even talk to your team. Email is the wild west of work communication, and full of messages that start with “sorry for the delay.” 

So many tools, so little relief 

Naturally, we tried to fix it. We introduced labels, filters, rules. We launched plugins and integrations. We tried inbox zero. New platforms promised better collaboration. “Don’t send an email, just start a thread!” they said. 

But all these tools are layers on top of email. In most organizations, email remains the default interface for incoming work. You might track tasks in Notion or Jira, but how did the task get there? Probably started in an email. 

The truth is, we’ve spent 20 years building tools to escape email, while never actually escaping it. And now, every team lives in a different system, but email is the one system they all still use. It’s the lowest common denominator of the digital workplace. 

Reframing email 

But here’s where things start to shift. What if email isn’t the problem, but rather how we treat it? What if we stopped using email as a place to work from and started using it as a place to pull work from? 

That’s the idea behind a new breed of tools built not to replace email, but to quietly reorganize it. Tools that use AI to detect work requests inside messages. Tools that turn those requests into tasks, deliverables, even meetings. Tools that live inside your calendar and actually understand your capacity. 

Belt takes this approach to its logical conclusion. Instead of asking teams to manually forward, flag, or copy-paste work from their inbox, Belt reads the message, understands the request, and builds the work around it. No dashboards. No extra tabs. Just… work, where it belongs. 

It doesn’t kill email. It absorbs it. Like a sponge. Or a translator. The email comes in. Belt reads it. It becomes something actionable. Scheduled. Trackable. Alive. And for the first time in decades, the inbox feels a little less like a burden, and a little more like a source of truth. 

Email Isn’t Going Anywhere 

Let’s be honest. Email isn’t going away. Not this year. Not next year. It’s too embedded, too flexible, too… normal. But that doesn’t mean we have to keep living in it. 

The future of work isn’t one without email. It’s one where email stops being the interface and starts being the input. Where work doesn’t hide in subject lines or get buried in threads. Where AI doesn’t just listen, it knows what to do with what it hears. 

And we are no longer dreaming of a world where “Sorry, I missed this” is a thing of the past. Because if work starts in your inbox, Belt makes sure it gets done.