Last year I sent 398 emails to people who weren't me. That's the whole of 2025. Between the first of this month and the twentieth I sent 383.
I typed almost none of them.
My day used to start in the inbox. Read what came in overnight, work out what each thing needed, answer it or route it somewhere. The list gets written by other people and you work down it. Now it starts in the outbox, where I'm reading what my agents sent while I was asleep and checking two things. Did it go to the right person, and would I have put it that way.
My inbox didn't get quieter. Of the 559 messages that left my personal account this month, 176 came straight back to me. My own agents, reporting in. A job board that failed a step overnight. A recruiter reply that needs steering. A loop that stopped running and wants a look.
So the volume didn't drop, the authorship changed. Most of what I read in a morning was written by my own operation about what it just did, instead of by someone else about what they want from me.
I still spend time in the inbox and I won't pretend otherwise. Plenty only ever arrives there. It just isn't where I start, and it isn't where I find out what my own business did yesterday.
Two years ago I'd have called this reckless. I'd have been right, then. As of this week there are 23 named agents sending from my addresses, and the scheduled ones alone have sent 856 messages since the middle of May. Most of it went out without me reading it first. Recruiters, vendors, a surveyor. People with no idea the thread they're sitting in wasn't started by a person.
What changed isn't that they stopped being wrong. They still are, regularly. What moved is the price of checking. Reading nineteen messages over coffee and pulling the two that are off is maybe an hour of my week, and I'd have spent that hour anyway. Writing nineteen a day was never an hour. That's why I used to write one.
There's still a list of things that can't leave without me. It's short. Shorter than it was in June, and I keep moving things off it rather than onto it, which is the direction I'd have bet against a year ago.
It isn't the 383. It's that in 2025 I managed roughly one outbound email a day, for a year. Almost none of what goes out now is work I used to do and handed over. It's work that never happened at all, because there was one of me and there were about four hundred emails a year in me.
If that sounds like the shape of your week, here's what I do about it.