Why Quarry's founders read email twice a day instead of forty times

Quarry is twelve people building developer infrastructure, which is to say it is twelve people who all believe in deep work and all check their email approximately every eleven minutes.

Idris Lindqvist had tried the standard remedies. Notifications off, then back on. A rule that email is only read at 11:00 and 16:00, abandoned within a fortnight. The problem was never discipline; it was that once every few days something genuinely urgent arrived, and the cost of missing it was high enough to justify checking constantly.

Watching for the fire

The instruction Quarry gave its first agent was blunt: if a customer's production is down, if an investor asks a direct question, or if a candidate we made an offer to replies — interrupt me. Otherwise do not.

We did not want a smarter inbox. We wanted permission to stop looking at it.

Everything below that bar is triaged, drafted where the reply is obvious, and held for the two batch windows. The agent's own confidence is not the deciding factor — anything it is unsure about is escalated rather than guessed, which in practice means one or two extra interruptions a week and no missed fires in fourteen months.

Second-order effects

The result the team did not predict was what happened to internal email. Once the founders stopped answering at all hours, the rest of the company stopped expecting it. Quarry's average internal thread is now four messages instead of eleven, and roughly a third of what used to be email is a brief with three comments on it.

• Two scheduled email windows a day, at 11:00 and 16:30
• One standing agent per founder, three or four sentences each
• Interruptions averaging 1.8 a week, all of them warranted

Idris is careful about the claim. Quarry has not solved email. It has moved the decision about when to read it from forty times a day to once, at setup, in writing.