The blue light from the monitor is beginning to vibrate against my retinas, a rhythmic pulsing that matches the dull throb behind my left temple as I scroll past the 31st iteration of a thread that should have died 11 days ago. I am looking for a single number. Just one. The final, approved budget for the Q1 marketing rollout, but instead of a spreadsheet or a central dashboard, I am navigating a digital landfill. I find a thread titled ‘Budget Draft,’ then another titled ‘Re: Final Budget Numbers (for real this time),’ and a third, most terrifying one, simply labeled ‘Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: LOOK AT THIS.’ Each one contains a different attachment. Each one has 11 people CC’d, half of whom have contributed nothing but a ‘Thanks!’ or a ‘Following’ that serves only to shove the actual data further into the abyss of the scroll.

It is the same nauseating sensation I felt last month when I sat in a boardroom and explained, with 11 pages of data to back me up, that our current server infrastructure would collapse if we hit 1001 concurrent users. I was right. I was told I was being ‘pessimistic.’ The system crashed when we hit 911 users. Being right and being ignored creates a specific kind of internal friction, a heat that stays in your chest long after the argument is over. You start seeing the same patterns of willful ignorance everywhere, especially in how we communicate. We use email as a project management tool, a file storage system, and a decision-making engine, despite it being fundamentally designed to be none of those things. It is a digital postcard system that we have forced to carry the weight of a skyscraper.

We ‘loop in’ extra people like a digital bystander effect, assuming that if 11 people are watching the thread, surely someone will notice when the project veers off a cliff. But the opposite happens. The more people on the CC line, the less any individual feels responsible for the outcome.

I remember a specific instance where a $1001 mistake was made simply because the ‘approved’ version of a contract was buried in a sub-thread that only three people saw. We are obsessed with the ‘Reply All’ button because it feels like work. It feels like inclusion. In reality, it is just noise. It is a way of offloading the anxiety of a decision onto a group so that if things go wrong, the blame is diffused across a dozen avatars. This organizational dysfunction isn’t just a nuisance; it’s a structural failure. We are trying to build complex, high-stakes outcomes on a foundation of ephemeral, chronological snippets. It is like trying to build a house by texting pictures of bricks to a group of 11 masons and hoping they all end up at the same site on the same day.

We need to stop pretending that ‘I’ll email it to you’ is a valid workflow. It isn’t. It’s a hand-off into a void. When you look at specialized industries, you see a total rejection of this kind of ‘make-do’ attitude. Take professional construction or high-end maintenance, for example. If you have a shower that is leaking through the floorboards, you don’t just throw more standard grout at it and hope the porous nature of the material magically changes. You recognize that standard grout is the wrong tool for a high-stress, high-moisture environment. You bring in specialists like Leaking Showers Sealed because they understand that a permanent fix requires specialized epoxy grout-a tool designed specifically for the job at hand. They don’t compromise on the material because the cost of failure is a rotted subfloor and a $10001 repair bill down the line.

The Grout Analogy: The Cost of Wrong Tools

Why, then, do we treat our corporate ‘subfloors’ with such negligence? We use email-the ‘standard grout’ of the internet-to try and seal up complex projects that require the structural integrity of a dedicated management platform. We see the leaks. We see the missed deadlines, the lost files, and the 11th-hour panics where nobody knows who gave the final ‘go’ signal. Yet, we keep pouring more email into the cracks. It is a refusal to admit that the tool we have used for 21 years might no longer be fit for the complexity of the tasks we are asking it to perform.

I find myself back at the screen, staring at those two budget attachments. My pulse is at 81 beats per minute, which is high for someone just sitting in a chair. Cora J.-M. once told me about a thief who walked out of a department store with a flat-screen TV because he wore a high-vis vest and acted like he was supposed to be there.

There is a deep, underlying laziness in the ‘Reply All.’ It requires no thought to include everyone. It requires actual effort to decide who needs to know, where the data should live, and how to record a decision so it can be found in 31 seconds rather than 31 minutes. We avoid that effort because we are exhausted by the very tool that was supposed to make us efficient. It’s a feedback loop of incompetence. We are too busy reading emails to set up a system that would eliminate the need for those emails. I think about the argument I lost about the server. I was right about the 1001 users, but it didn’t matter because the information was delivered in a way that allowed people to ignore it. It was just another ‘opinion’ in a stream of 11 other opinions.

To break the cycle, we have to start valuing the ‘where’ as much as the ‘what.’ If a decision isn’t recorded in a central, immutable place, did it even happen? If the budget number is only in an email, it isn’t a budget; it’s a rumor. We need to treat our professional communication with the same precision that a specialist treats a structural leak. Stop using the porous, crumbling grout of the inbox to hold together the weight of your company’s future. It might feel easier in the moment to just hit ‘send’ and move on, but you are just waiting for the rot to set in. Eventually, the floor will give way, and no amount of CC’ing will stop the fall.

I close the browser tab. I am going to call the project lead. Not email. Call. I will ask for the number, and then I will put that number in a shared document that everyone can see. It is a small act, a single 1 on a scoreboard of 1001, but it is a start. We have to stop living in the threads and start living in the facts.

The next time someone ‘loops you in’ on a 51-message chain, ask yourself if you are actually working or if you are just watching the building leak.