Tim Harford, on this occasion is wrong. I’ve just been catching up with the FT Weekend (it’s half term and things are quite hectic at home, I only manage to get into the shed office on occasion on weeks like this) and, as always, tucked into his column first.
This week (February 14th 2026) (Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email Paywall) he bemoans the overuse of instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp being used for important messages when email is a better format for such. He talks about how IMs ‘ping’ and email doesn’t ‘ping’, how the big advantage of email is it’s asynchronous and so doesn’t require an instant response; how one of the biggest issues with IM apps is that they are closed and the price of exit is too high because you’d either have to leave your friends on the app or take them with you, not an issue with an open standard like email.
Much of what he points out is correct, as I have come to expect from him, but some of it is plain wrong – how is it that he can’t turn off the ‘ping’ of WhatsApp on his mobile but is quite OK to turn of email notifications? By arguing that email is better for ‘important’ messages he appears to be willfully ignoring when an important message is also urgent, in which case an asynchronous system is not what you need. Let’s take a case in point. Important-not-urgent could be the travel details of the in-laws in the next school holiday period so that we remember that we won’t have childcare (admission here that in our case the chance would be a fine thing), in which we need to know this information but don’t need it now. Important-and-urgent could be (Harford agrees that IM is good for urgent messages, but not for long ones) that we’ve forgotten that our youngest needs to be picked up early from school today to go to scout camp and the form, attached, that has been filled and signed needs to be printed and handed in. In this second case, email just won’t cut it unless you are expected to be monitoring your personal email whilst working.
But these are all niggles. My disagreement with Harford’s article is the elephant in the room, and I can only think that he has deliberately avoided this for the sake of building his argument.
I get that these IM apps are closed, which is a nightmare. Some years ago I persuaded a group of friends to move our chat to Signal, in order to stick it to WhatsApp’s Meta – to this day only that group of friends is on Signal, I communicate with exactly no one else using it. But I think this is by-the-by and not relevant to Harford’s argument about using email over IM apps.
What Harford fails to mention is the sheer volume of unwanted email received. I don’t receive unwanted IM messages really at all. But with email I get hundreds a week. I’m not talking about spam, these are for the most part legally sent messages, from businesses I have bought products from etc. but mainly it’s services I actually use.
I’m convinced that they could be sending 25% of the messages they actually do, but I have three children and their schools send around 30 messages per week per child, most of them irrelevant, not sent in any particular way, there is not ‘agreement’ on how they will send messages. So they might send 5 on one day on none for the next two or three days. Some of the messages come from the school itself (often ‘Y4 Boys Football’ – I have three girls, none in Y4) whilst others come from the PTA. Other child-relevant messages are those receipts for dinner money top ups, endless automated messages from the scout portal, gymnastics holiday classes, health advice from the NHS. What’s worse is that many of these emails are along the lines of ‘Dear X, attached is a letter from the Headmaster’, so instead of just reading the letter from the Headmaster, you need to click and open an attached PDF. Given that most emails like this are opened in mobile phones, you then need to pinch zoom to see the message.
I receive reams of this cod informational junk, and no matter how hard I try to unsubscribe, it just keeps coming. Apparently, according to Hardford, Cory Doctorow is an ’email power user’ – what does that even mean? Email is woefully distracting. Does that mean that Doctorow is super efficient in responding to email? Or just spends time tidying up his inbox such that he doesn’t actually get any work done. Doctorow has a child, how has the child-centred email worked out for him?
Perhaps Harford is talking about work email, and not domestic email, but the article suggests not. My partner, a UK Civil Servant, gets 120 emails per working day, each one at least needs to be opened, ranging in response time from 30 seconds to an hour. As she said the other day, if she was generous and said each took an average of just 10 minutes, that’s 20 hours of work per day, and answering emails is not the job she is paid to do.
I guess I digress here a bit, but Harford does seem to be living in a world in which he gets sent twenty completely relevant emails a day to respond to. Not, in my domestic case’ 80% irrelevant rubbish and in the case of my partner 20 hours of emails to deal with in an 8 hour day, if only there were no meeting scheduled. I think the only way I could be happy with email is if I spent hours on a regular basis dealing with it, by which I mean adding filters and folders etc, but I have a life to lead. In the meantime bring on A World Without Email.