The ones who answer emails at eleven at night

Posted on: 4 June 2026

You know the people who answer emails at eleven at night, copying in half the office so that the diligence is on the record, and by the time you write to them at midday you already have the faint sense of being behind on something you didn't even know had started? The ones who never stop, skip lunch, multiply the meetings they themselves convene, keep a calendar that takes your breath away just to look at from the outside. The word you would use to describe them, voice lowered, over a coffee, is that they are spinning their wheels: much motion, little to show for it. That description is wrong. They are not spinning their wheels at all. They produce a great deal, only not the thing their busyness claims to produce.

It helps to begin with a distinction that dismantles the comforting way this story is usually told. The convenient version says the person simply hasn't yet grasped that quality matters more than quantity, and that a little patience in explaining it would do the trick. It is the classic reading that makes whoever pronounces it feel wise and whoever receives it feel slightly dim, and it is almost always false, better suited to a fortune cookie than to a diagnosis. Someone who runs like this is not short of intelligence; they are responding, with a precision that on closer inspection is almost touching, to a system that can read only one thing about them.

Activity is visible the instant it happens, whereas quality becomes visible months later, when nobody connects the result to the effort that produced it, or it isn't measured at all. In almost every organisation I have passed through, the signal rewarded in real time was movement, never outcome. My mother used to say that everyone sees the work but nobody sees the time. The person who churns out forty mediocre things fills the screen, looks like the one holding the place together, gets sought out, while the one who does a single good thing and then withdraws to think for a fortnight vanishes from the radar, and in the unspoken language of the environment their absence comes dangerously close to looking like a holiday. Frenzy, in this light, is not a miscalculation but rather the perfect translation of oneself into a currency the people around you can count. You are producing legibility, which is a commodity in its own right, and a scarce one.

Then there is a layer beneath, less presentable, in which the constant motion serves also, and perhaps above all, to keep you from ever arriving at the question that frightens: if I stopped, would anything change? As long as you keep moving you are not forced to know whether the bottleneck is you, and the question stays permanently postponed to the first moment of quiet, which is of course carefully prevented. I have watched people sustain impossible calendars for years with the single aim, never confessed even to themselves, of denying themselves the half hour in which that diagnosis might surface. Busyness works as an anaesthetic; it does not prevent the doubt about one's own centrality, it sedates it, which is a different and more valuable service.

At this point the quick reader thinks they have understood the piece, and imagines the conclusion to be an invitation to slow down, to breathe, to recognise one's worth beyond output. It is not. This is not that piece. There is a third layer, and as an Italian raised in a certain culture of sacrifice I recognise it without effort, even though it comes not from Rome but from much further north. It is the idea, never stated and for that very reason invincible, that a thing produced quietly and excellently, without suffering, has not truly been earned. Suffering certifies; output on its own is not enough to justify itself, the toil is needed to stand as moral guarantor. Someone who lives this way does not want to do less, because doing less would take from them not the result but the absolution.

Looked at closely, this means we are facing a behaviour that performs three jobs at once, and of these three only one, the least important, is the declared one. It produces a signal the environment knows how to reward, then it keeps at bay a truth that would disintegrate one's self-esteem, and finally it settles a toll of suffering that makes success ethically sustainable for whoever attains it. Three hidden functions and a single visible one, and it is almost always the visible one, the most harmless, that we set out to correct when we try to talk sense into someone like this.

And this is where anyone who wants to help comes unstuck. You try to explain to them that quality matters more than quantity, and they nod, because they already know, they knew before you did, they have probably even read the right books on the subject. Awareness does not scratch the behaviour by a millimetre, for the simplest and most overlooked reason: awareness operates on the declared level, while the behaviour is anchored to the three levels beneath, which remain invisible even to the one enacting them. Explaining quality to them is like explaining hydrostatics to someone who is drowning. True, pertinent, perfectly useless in the instant it would be needed.

So the question becomes: how do they get out, people like this? And the answer is the part of the piece one does not write gladly, because it consoles nobody. They do not get out through epiphany; there is no decisive conversation, no life-changing book, no mentor who opens their eyes. They get out when the visible effort stops paying even one of its hidden dividends, and that usually happens through collapse, not through insight. The body that gives way, the firm that replaces them while they were convinced they were irreplaceable, the moment when all that running no longer produces even the signal that justified it. It is the breakdown that does the work no argument can do, and only when the machine stops of its own accord, against the will of the one who was driving it, does that dreaded half hour of quiet become inevitable, and the question postponed for years presents itself all at once.

I know the man who answers emails at eleven at night very well, given that for a certain time I was him. I did not get out of the loop because someone had explained something intelligent to me, and God knows they had explained it, but I got out much later, and in a way I would not wish on anyone as a method.

The next time you watch him run, and you feel the urge to tell him to slow down, hold one thing in mind: you are not watching him waste energy, you are watching him settle a debt whose amount and whose creditor you do not know.