Lots of us suffer from email overload, but few have taken such dramatic steps to address it as Dan Ariely. He’s a behavioral economist at Duke University who was so buried by emails he wrote software to help triage his messages, and uses a two-page auto-response to redirect all but the most important ones.\u0010\u0010Rebecca confesses this week that she has 2,026 unread emails. That number might send you into a cold sweat or sound kind of low, depending on what kind of email personality you have. Email is such a universal enemy that strict deletion regimes like Inbox Zero have gained cult-like followings, and office chat apps like Slack hope to make it obsolete. Despite these efforts, email isn’t going anywhere, so you may as well learn to deal with it. And there are some things about email you may come to like—or even love.

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