The reason why smart, professional people still use email

Once upon a time, long ago, there lived a communications channel.

You typed messages into a screen and then you pressed 'send'. Delivery was as good as instant. This communications channel could be used on both computers and smartphones. It also allowed for multiple message recipients and further discussion among all those recipients.

That communication channel, traces of which can still be found today if you look carefully, was called email.

For 10 or 15 years before the development of messaging apps like WhatsApp or Signal, this is how most of us did written correspondence. Certainly when it came to professional or administrative communication, anyway.

As the apps began to take hold, our social lives moved onto them. But that was where it ended. And that was kind of sensible. It was work-life balance, right? You had fun, quick stuff on your phone app, and you had serious, more nuanced stuff on your email - which you could access via your device of choice.

At some point, as usual without any consultation or vote, almost every aspect of communication moved onto the apps. Employed people within organisations still use email 'at work', but outside of that? Emailing friends or acquaintances whose WhatsApp contact you have in your phone seems to be considered weird behaviour.\ \ As a freelancer and member of various organisations, I've found a lot of important information migrating to the small screen as a matter of policy. I've also found people sharing long academic PDFs in messaging apps. Hour-long documentaries. Travel plans. Administrative queries. Processes to be followed over the next 14 months. Particularly and specifically in group chats.

In short, things are being shared in groups that

a) require close attention or detailed reading

b) are ideally enjoyed on a big screen

c) you will probably want to be able to find again for future reference

None of that really works for me. And I'm about to suggest that it doesn't really work for any of us. Not if we care about quality, at least.

Messaging apps are dumbed-down email

Apps may have their place if you want to send stupid memes or engage in mindless banter.

But for actual work, planning or anything that involves a modicum of brain engagement? I still believe email is perfect for these purposes. We have moved to a demonstrably worse solution in terms of our health, our efficiency and the quality of what we do.

Silicon Valley is already succeeding in dumbing us down with AI. That we have also moved to a dumbed-down version of an excellent communications channel is yet another victory for the tech moguls.

I began this article with what I hope was a strikingly similar description that covers both email and messaging apps. The point there was to outline that email isn't the weird, outdated, alien thing people seem to think it is.

With that done, I now need to stress the vital points of difference. The things email has had along but which apps took away (and will probably try to upsell to us as 'Premium' in due course...)

First, messaging apps rely on the same 'notification-response' mechanism that drives so much smartphone addiction. Unless you're very deliberate with your settings - and most people conspicuously aren't - app pings demand your attention in just the same way social media pings do. I'm not here to talk about smartphone addiction, but I want to highlight a mechanism that compels people to respond immediately to messages.

While the impulse to respond immediately is perhaps nothing more than a bad but controllable habit when it comes to one-on-one chats, it's almost unavoidable in groups. Healthily ignoring notifications until a convenient moment won't help you here. Somebody writes something 'important' - see the list above - and you know that message is going to be buried beneath an avalanche of rubbish at any given moment. This is built into the system. Answer now before your prompt disappears.

This is the mechanism by which thoughtful, considered communication withers and dies in group chats. Many of these posts require digestion. Perhaps a little consideration and a larger screen. Or a keyboard designed for more than thumbs. Maybe your response requires a chat with a third party, which now adds a second layer of stress while the original message hovers on a brink of being bumped. At the very least, it might require saving or filing somewhere it can be found in the near or distant future.

So, not only are we feeling a constant stress to respond, but we're probably not going to respond as well as we might.

Now consider exactly the same message, but sent to an email list. Here's where the fundamental difference between an email inbox and an app inbox comes into play. That message is unlikely to be bumped down by a bunch of Insta reels, stuff about other topics or matters that don't even concern you. Even if it is, you can sleep easy in the knowledge that it won't leave your inbox. It has a subject line, which allows you to find it a week or two later. That, friends, is a healthy, low-stress system by comparison.

With email, you are still the boss. Even if it's a group email and even if it lands with a ping on your phone, you do not need to worry about it falling off your radar. You can decide when to jump in and process messages. Emails don't tug at your sleeve in the same nagging way that message at the top of a group chat does. In a world where we seek work-life balance, surely we should savour a communications channel that waits passively for us to be ready?

And yes, group chats were actually a thing on email. For people actually trying to do serious work or organise something, they still can be. All the messages pertaining to the specific issue are grouped under the subject line, without any cat videos or new debates confusing the situation. That's better, isn't it?

And then there is the filing. Processing. Saving. Organising. Whatever you want to call it. Is that still a thing? For any professional person without an army of personal assistants to wade through the jumble, it has to be. There is, after all, more stuff coming at us on more channels than ever before. If we want to achieve anything at all, we have to learn to prioritise what's urgent, what to ignore and what can wait for a quiet moment.

What apps do is eliminate the third category entirely. We either jump right away - probably while handling something else - or we ignore.\ \ I've done enough hurried skim-reading on my phone to know that jumping right away is useless when it comes to any content requiring actual digestion. Very little of it sticks. I have learned, the hard way, that if we want to really take something in, we need to dedicate real time to it. But the big PDF in your group chat doesn't want that. It wants you to skim-read with half a brain while talking to somebody and driving. Because, as I think we mentioned, it's about to get bumped down the chat, falling off our radars forever.

Call me a dinosaur, but my solution to this - when someone is professional enough to send things by email - is to put the email in labelled folders. And/or save the link you sent in my browser bookmarks for later attention. And/or save the PDF you sent in my iCloud, which has a file structure I made myself and which makes sense to me.

This is not OCD. Filing and folders is how everyone organised information before attention-sapping, jump-now devices changed our behaviour.

Believe it or not, this actually does work better than skimming things, responding immediately and then never touching them again. Only yesterday, I found an email that solved a puzzle to do with my pension scheme. It dated back to 2015.

Do messaging apps let you make labelled folders? That seems vaguely preposterous. Can you access your complex cloud file structure on your phone? Sure, I guess you can, but who does that on a little screen with a couple of thumbs? For me, dragging and dropping files is a job for a decent-sized screen and a mouse. And what do you know? My email inbox lives right next door to that process. Always did.

Someone needs to explain to me why having to open WhatsApp Web and Signal on my computer, to fish out stuff that would have been fine to send by email, and save it somewhere appropriate, is better. Three messaging inboxes instead of one? Three times the admin? What problem does that solve, again?

(Keep in mind that getting away from WhatsApp and Signal is exactly the reason I, and perhaps many other people who want to do real, concentrated work, go to the computer in the first place. People like me want these distractions closed because they are bad for productivity.)

Our weird relationship with email in 2026

Hopefully I've now convinced you that using messaging apps for communication that actually matters, beyond dumb reels and basic social planning, is a poor, second-rate cousin to email. It's a child-like alternative that puts us on a par with monkeys in a cage experiment: notification-response, notification-response, notification-response. We're giving knee-jerk reactions to important topics, rushing important decisions, losing important information we might need later and we're skim-reading when we shouldn't be. It's a particular problem in group chats, given the way information is structured in them.

Yet some part of us seems still to understand that email is better. I've observed this on a few occasions recently, when emailing friends and acquaintances about, say, travel plans. These were shortish texts that would have received a guaranteed same-day response on WhatsApp. But the same text on email? Despite being read on the same device and requiring no more or less input in terms of a reply? Nope, they couldn't manage it!

It's worth repeating: This is literally a case of typing the same text into a slightly different screen, and hitting 'send'. The time commitment is essentially the same. But as soon as it's a email rather than an app message, people end up apologising profusely at a later date - often, even more ironically, on WhatsApp - that they "never got to my email".

This is so absurd that there has to be an explanation! And I suspect it lies in some primal awareness of what I've been saying throughout this piece. Deep down, we understand that email doesn't put pressure on us. We grasp that we can "get to" email as and when it suits, and perhaps even give a more considered response when we do. Great!

The only thing is, we never do find - or make - a time that suits. Back when emails were only on your computer - or letters came in the mailbox! - making this time was part of your daily schedule. In a good way: you were focused on what you were reading and processing. We're still totally capable of doing this - I know it because it's essential for me as a freelancer. But it feels like the majority of us have lost the ability to set aside time for correspondence. We just do it all on the fly...all the time...and badly.

It's widely accepted that we're distracted, exhausted and overstimulated. We all face challenges separating work and admin from our downtime. And I don't think using messaging apps - especially group chats - for professional or organisational communication is helping with that.

So if you'd like a thoughtful reply from me on any topic, want to send me a PowerPoint file, have a photograph I can publish, want to tell me about some new SOP I'll still need next year, or even if want to send me a link to a long article I might use for my work, I'd really appreciate you sending that over by email.

That way, it won't get lost - and it will get the attention it deserves.