Former Manchester United star Gary Neville wants to give up emails and find “more peace”.
The businessman and property developer touched on his frustration with emails and instant messaging during an interview with UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones in his latest ‘Mind Your Own Business’ podcast.
After “falling ill” one Christmas, Neville said he vowed to make some basic rules to ensure that he doesn’t spend too long on his smartphone.
“At the moment I’m actually trying to come off email,” he told Jones.
“I want to go back to people ringing me up, I want to go back to meeting people face-to-face. All people do now is just email everybody. I want it to stop, I’ve had enough.”
Neville compared receiving emails to being “attacked” and described them as “intrusive”. He said his inbox was full of emails he’d been cc’ed into that weren’t even meant for him.
“You feel like you need to see your messages and check your emails and then you feel like you need to reply,” he added.
“And then you just get distracted from what you’re actually doing.”
Neville praised other applications including Slack and WhatsApp, which he described as friendlier and more personal, but predicted email is now “a thing of the past”.
“I can genuinely see the end of email,” he said. “I think there will be a different form of it.”
Neville co-owns Hotel Football, next to Manchester United’s Old Trafford ground, and has been given the green light to build another hotel in Manchester city centre.
He also owns a significant stake in digital agency e3creative, co-owns Salford City Football Club and his university UA92 is due to open its doors next year.
“At the moment, I want more peace and I think everybody wants more peace,” he said. “They don’t want to be continually attacked by notifications.
“All my notifications are now off on every app, so I don’t get anything flashing through. I never have my phone on loud, it’s always on silent, it’s things like that I’ve changed over the last 12 months.”