Explanation
The Joke
A man observes that he checks email constantly -- it eats up about four hours a day -- but if he batched it, it would only take 30 minutes. His friend agrees this is a good point, calling it "not just a point, it's a lifestyle choice." Encouraged, the man announces he will stop answering email altogether, let it pile up in his inbox, then on his deathbed he will have everyone gather around so he can give the maximum amount of his attention to his mountain of unread emails.
The comic then jumps forward to "Decades Later," where the now-elderly man is on his deathbed, telling a computer to notify everyone in his inbox that he cannot deal with his messages because he is dying. He asks the computer to send his "sincerest apologies."
The Humor
The joke escalates a relatable productivity observation -- that email consumes a disproportionate amount of our time -- to an absurd logical extreme. The man takes the reasonable insight about batching email and stretches it to its most ridiculous conclusion: batching all email into one session at the moment of death. The punchline works because even on his literal deathbed, he still feels obligated to respond to his inbox, which is a darkly comic commentary on how email has become an inescapable obligation that haunts modern professionals. The fact that his final words are essentially an out-of-office auto-reply underscores how thoroughly email culture has colonized our sense of duty.