How long have you been using email?

At last week’s ThinkTank PA Corporate Summit, I asked the room full of 300 EAs and executive support professionals a simple question - "How long have you been using email?"

Their answer stopped me for a second.

72.3% have been using email for 20+ years. Another 15.3% for 15-20 years.

That means almost 9 in 10 people in that room learned email before smartphones existed. Before "inbox zero" was a phrase. Before anyone taught them a system for handling it — because there wasn't one to teach.

And yet we still struggle to keep the inbox under control. As I write in my new book Triage Your Inbox: you're not overwhelmed because you lack discipline, or because you're disorganised, or unable to keep up. You're overwhelmed because you were handed one of the most powerful workflow engines ever created — and never given an operating system for it.

Before email, friction on the sender's side acted as a filter: writing a letter took effort, so communication stayed considered and low-volume. Email removed that friction almost overnight, and what was left wasn't correspondence anymore — it became a workflow engine running constantly, owned by no one, governed by nothing.

Twenty years on, most of us have developed our own survival strategy and every strategy is different.

💬 So here's my question for you: when's the last time you actually rebuilt your email habits, rather than just tolerating them?

Drop a number in the comments — how many years have you been using email? I'd love to see how this compares outside that conference room.