When email first emerged on the scene, it was a novelty — and a marvel.
It was fast. You could send messages to people on the other side of the world and they would receive it instantly.
It was scaleable. You could write one message and copy many people on it, saving the time of writing and sending multiple copies of the same message.
It was free. No stamps required. No schlepping to the post-office.
Except, as we’ve learned in the ensuring years, email isn’t free.
As the volume of emails have increased, so too have the costs of email. At one time was just about sorting the signal — real emails — from the noise of junk mail or spam. Over time, the problem got more complex. The proliferation of newsletters and other emails that you might legitimately want to receive but aren’t important right now means more time to sort through the noise to find the signal.
Many email platforms have implemented features that purport to handle these issues. But none of them truly solve the problem. And even if they did eliminate the noise to clear space for the signal, they don’t address the bigger issue:
Email is one of the most expensive forms of communication that exists today.
The biggest cost of email is not the time it takes to read or write it, or even to find it. What makes email expensive is the cognitive cost.
The Cost of Small Interruptions
This is yet another place where people radically underestimate the cognitive cost of “small” interruptions and administrative tasks.
Every time you check email to see if you have a new message, you interrupt the flow of your other work. That interruption breaks your focus on the task at and requires on average 20 minutes of recovery time.
But that’s not all.
Cognitive Fragmentation
Email is not just about reading, replying, and moving on.
For many ADHD/system-thinking brains, email creates cognitive fragmentation.
Each message potentially opens:
- decisions
- obligations
- interpretations
- relationship dynamics
- future consequences
- and competing priorities
This sets up a split in the brain that opens the door for
- branching pathways
- future planning
- emotional processing
- scenario simulation
- task reprioritization
- nervous system activation
- and context fragmentation.
It sets up a cycle of reactivity: once you open and read an email, your brain locks in on how to respond — even if you don’t actually respond in that moment.
And once you send an email, you’re laying in wait for the response. Notice how often you check your email after you respond so to someone compared with before.
That’s why it’s so expensive.
The ADHD Surcharge
Email carries an extra charge for people with ADHD. For minds that are already prone to fragmentation, email adds fuel to the fire.
It’s not only that small interruptions cost us more in terms of cognitive bandwidth and re-set time.
Our minds works best when we can sustain one coherent thread, deepen into it, and follow associative pathways without interruption until completion.
Once we check or respond to email, we introduce fragmentation. Other peoples’ agendas and opinions start to dominate our schedule. We get pulled into a cycle of reactivity, which destroys focus and flow.
The open loop caused by emails awaiting reply diverts our attention and consumes precious bandwidth.
In addition, email — like all written communication — also lacks tone. We read it in the tone of our energy. This makes it especially vulnerable to misinterpretation, which can lead to rumination and keep us trapped in a cycle where nothing else can move forward until we close the loop.
Email Is Not Free
The real cost of email isn’t the time to write it, read it, or respond to it — it’s the cognitive fragmentation that results from the engagement with it.
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