A colleague told me a story about wartime mail censorship, where reading every letter for secrets was impossible—too much volume. The solution: let mail sit for a week before delivery.

Time did the filtering. If troop movements happened Tuesday, a letter arriving Friday was harmless. Sensitive information expires. Delay neutralized the threat without reading a word.

The delay wasn't a bug. It was the filter.

This applies to work, where we treat every ping as urgent, but urgency is self-selecting—things that matter keep surfacing.

The meeting that seemed critical Monday but disappears by Wednesday wasn't important. The feature request raised three times in two weeks is real. Time sorts signal from noise better than you can.

We can't distinguish signal from noise in real-time because every fire looks urgent up close, but time adds distance, and distance adds clarity.

Important things resurface louder. That's not failure—that's the filter working. What matters doesn't disappear when ignored for thirty seconds.

I feel compelled to respond to everything immediately—it feels like diligence—but that's the trap: diligence becomes indiscriminate attention, and indiscriminate attention trains everyone around you to expect instant response.

The fix isn't complicated: build in delay. Your inbox doesn't need sorting. It needs aging.