Most email advice is built for a reader who doesn’t exist.
A reader who is calm, focused, curious, and ready to engage.
A reader with time, energy, and motivation.
A reader who opens emails intentionally and reads them carefully, top to bottom.
That is not how the inbox works in real life (well at least not for the majority of people).
Real inboxes are checked between meetings, on commutes, while standing in queues, during moments of cognitive overload, stress, fatigue, distraction, in the morning out of habit, mindless scrolling and emotional noise. They are checked habitually, not leisurely. Functionally, not curiously.
If your email strategy assumes perfect conditions, it will fail under real ones.
This blog is about designing emails for tired brains — the brains your emails actually land in — not the idealised versions we wish existed.
RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.
Email design has been framed for years as a visual discipline.
But the core job of email design is not to impress.
It is to reduce effort.
When someone opens an email, they are already spending cognitive energy. They have already made a decision: “I will give this a moment of my attention.” What happens next determines whether that moment becomes engagement or friction.
This is why I often say:
Design doesn’t create engagement. It creates the conditions for engagement.
The inbox is a task and utility environment.
People do not say:
“I’m going to browse my inbox.”
They say (or think):
“I need to check something.”
They enter their inbox to:This matters because attention behaves differently in task environments than in browsing environments.
In a task environment:This is why inbox behaviour cannot be understood through platform metrics alone. Open rates and clicks do not capture the mental state of the reader when your email arrives.
(You can find out more about this in my blog on inbox behaviour and human psychology.)
One of the most important things to understand about email is this:
People do not read emails, they scan them.
Especially when tired.
A tired brain is not looking for beautifully crafted email that ignites a fire of curiosity or FOMO. It is looking for:
The eyes move quickly, searching for meaning with minimal effort. This is why layout, hierarchy, spacing, and structure matter more than aesthetics.
Design choices that increase effort, even slightly, cause drop-off.
Examples of high-effort design patterns:A tired brain will not fight your design. It will simply move on.
Accessibility is often discussed as if it applies to “a small group of users”.
That framing is outdated and inaccurate.
When you design for:
…you are designing for reality.
Because cognitive overload, stress, distraction, and low energy affect everyone, not just a niche audience.
Accessible email design:In other words: accessibility is performance.
If your email only works for someone who is fully alert, focused, and patient, it does not work.
Find out more about this in my Email Design Handbook.
Most emails are designed as if the reader is operating at full capacity.
In reality, you should assume:
Designing for tired brains means asking different questions.
Not: “How do we make this more engaging?”
But: “How do we make this easier?”
Ease is not laziness at all!
Ease is respect for your audience.
Most engagement problems are not caused by bad content.
They are caused by too much effort.
Cognitive load builds when:
These moments create microfriction.
Microfriction rarely causes immediate unsubscribes. Instead, it creates disengagement over time. People stop opening not because they don’t care, but because opening feels costly.
There’s an important nuance here. Tired brains like predictable structure and they hate predictable content.
Structure creates safety:
But content still needs to deliver value. This is where many of you go wrong. You repeat the same promotional or sales patterns, tones, and messages until the brain learns to filter them out.
This is predictive coding at work.
When the brain knows what’s coming, it stops paying attention.
Design alone cannot solve:
Designing for tired brains also means designing the experience around the email:
This is why email design, deliverability, data, and strategy cannot be separated.
If you want immediate improvements, start here.
Most people don’t ignore emails because they don’t care. They ignore them because they don’t have the energy.
When you design for tired brains, you stop trying to capture attention and start earning it — by reducing effort, respecting context, and meeting people where they actually are.
That’s not just better design, it’s better email.
RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.