A common misunderstanding.

You don’t hate email. Even MG Siegler doesn’t hate it, even though he thinks he does.

You hate communicating with people unproductively. We can pretend it’s the fault of email, but it isn’t.

If you didn’t have email, you’d hate voicemail. Or twitter. Or faxes.

What you hate, and what we all hate, is the undisputable need to respond to people who are asking you to do something. This is not going away. Email might make it simpler to send a document, or a request, but the majority of those requests would come anyway.

You don’t need to fix email.

You need to fix your list of responsibilities, and the internal and external understanding of that list of responsibilities.

Stop looking at the trees, in other words. This is a forestry issue.