All of these things came to be not because of some intellectual or moral or aesthetic necessity, but just because . . . they *happened* to come to be. And once you get inside such a habit, it becomes “naturalized,” so that anything else seems weird.

But ponder: 20 or 25 years ago, vanishingly few people used e-mail. Most people had never even heard of it. And now we all bow to the great deity INBOX, as though it *must* be obeyed and must be overflowing.

As you rightly point out, there are much better ways of doing it — ways that will save companies real money, but only once they get their acts together.

I love the image of the inbox as the great deity. Kind of like Vaal in the original Star Trek series.

Here’s a key point I’ve been thinking about — one I’ll probably blog about myself: We have a mental image of corporations naturally pursuing efficient (i.e. market-driven) behavior, but in fact large organizations are as much bureaucratic as they are market-driven, and so there are many pockets of inefficient behavior.

E-mail is a big one. It’s not unlike the energy-efficiency steps that companies *don’t* take because . . . well, because they’re run by humans and they just *don’t*.

This entry from the Climate Progress blog talks about how Dow Chemical, working under an enlightened efficiency manager, made great strides in that area, saving millions of dollars — but then stopped doing it when the manager retired:

http://climateprogress.org/2008/07/25/energy-efficiency-part-2-the-limitless-resource/

We do dumb things like this all the time — but we don’t call ourselves on it.