The Tyranny of E-mail (25 page)

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

—
D
ON
K
NUTH
, S
TANFORD
U
NIVERSITY

In the next decade, the e-mail onslaught will continue to build and build and then build some more. As more people go online, as companies grow and expand internationally, as the pace of globalization increases, our inboxes will become as snarled as Los Angeles freeways during the morning commute. Fewer and fewer parts of the world will be untouched by wireless Internet access; in the summer of 2008, Delta Air Lines became the latest U.S. carrier to announce it would begin offering Internet access on flights. When you can get wireless access five miles above the earth while traveling at 600 miles per hour, you’ll soon be able to get it just about anywhere.

If we don’t pause to think about whether we need this tool available to us all the time, it will strangle our workdays like a creeper vine on steroids and keep us tied to our machines and
our inboxes right up until we crawl into bed. If we all keep agreeing to be continuously available long beyond the working days, deep into our vacations, and everywhere on the street, it will become harder and harder to step away from the computer or the screen. Those who do will be viewed as eccentrics or, worse, cranky Luddites who simply can’t handle the modern world.

There are several things you can do to take back control of your life and your workdays and the mental space that is necessary to mindfulness and happy living. I know, since I have watched it happen. Six months before beginning this book, I was receiving two to three hundred messages a day. I would log on in the morning and watch new e-mail march down my Outlook screen with a small bubble of joy—
I was needed!—
and a mountain of dread: if I didn’t respond to these messages, I would offend people, miss out on some key piece of business, add to the ever-increasing backlog of messages that was growing like a mulch pile in leaf season.

Trying to keep up with my e-mail, trying to get out in front of it, though, I made every e-mail mistake there was and invented some new ones. I sent “thanks” messages and cluttered inboxes with forwards; I sent messages without properly reading what I was replying to, creating more e-mail; I sent messages in a charged emotional state and definitely offended recipients; I read messages too quickly and was offended myself; I checked my e-mail late at night and first thing in the morning, shrinking my frame of reference to what came in over the e-mail transom, ruining my sleep, and driving my partner crazy through my constant zombielike attachment to my glowing machine; I mistyped and sent messages to the wrong people, forwarded messages without looking at what was in the thread; I subscribed to far too many Listservs and news feeds, making
my inbox a combination of to-do list, mailbox, and newspaper; I tried to coordinate complicated conversations and watched them dissolve into name-calling through lack of face-to-face interaction; I got so much e-mail that messages from the people I love got buried and I never answered them.

I began to trawl the Web and the bookstore, looking for solutions. There are dozens of books on e-mail overload, and many of them have helpful solutions. But none of them expands the focus beyond the past fifteen years, which seems like a massive oversight, given that we have leapfrogged far beyond previous generations’ rate of correspondence into a stratosphere that feels beyond human capacity. Furthermore, many of the books I looked at recommended yet more technology to solve the problem of e-mail overload. What I am going to recommend here, then, can be accomplished with very few add-ons and further buy-ins to the current system. It begins, too, with one very simple recommendation.

The most important thing you can do to improve the state of your inbox, free up your attention span, and break free of the tyranny of e-mail is not to send an e-mail. As most people now know, e-mail only creates more e-mail, so by stepping away from the messaging treadmill, even if for a moment every day, you instantly dial down the speed of the e-mail messagopolis. Your silence doesn’t just affect your inbox, it has a compounded effect on the people to whom you didn’t send messages: not getting your message will release some time for them to deal with something besides e-mail; and the less time they spend on e-mail, the less e-mail they will send; and so on.

Pausing for even a minute will also give you a chance to ask yourself several key questions that, if they become routine, will vastly improve your ability to use e-mail effectively. Before you send a message, ask yourself: Is this message essential? Does it need to arrive there instantly? Why am I sending it? What expectations or precedents will it set? If you’re sending a message to a friend on vacation, why not send a postcard? You might say less, but the physical object will mean more. If it’s a message to let someone know you’re just thinking about them, why not pick up the phone and leave your friend a voice mail? There are tones and textures to your voice that words cannot convey.

In
Conversation: The History of a Declining Art
, Stephen Miller describes how, as the habit of visiting people in their homes for meals and get-togethers has declined, our ability to hold interesting and rewarding conversations has deteriorated. Relying on e-mail to maintain friendships will only further this downward spiral, because the medium atrophies our ability to listen in real time, where it’s considered inappropriate to simply talk. Instead of sending your pal an e-mail or forwarding him a joke, make a date to meet him for coffee. Invite him over for dinner. It might feel uncomfortable at first, but the conversation you have in person will go a lot farther toward keeping your friendship going than a dozen e-mails and text messages scattered over the course of three months.

Not sending e-mail—by which I mean sending a lot less of it—might be difficult at work, but your coworkers will thank you. Eighty percent of corporate e-mail problems are caused by 1 percent of workers who use it inefficiently; are you in that 1 percent? The survey that turned up this statistic showed that one of the biggest generators of excess mail is a medium-sized message sent to a group of people, which then causes a pinball effect as people chime in and comment, having a virtual discussion.
If you have a question or a piece of information that is important enough to warrant such a discussion, pick up the phone: it will save everyone involved a series of short interruptions and mitigate the risk of tonal misunderstandings, which, as we have seen, can impede your ability to collaborate in the future.

Not sending e-mail will also help to break people out of the culture of the endless paper(less) trail. If you’re working with several people on a project, do all of them need to know you have viewed a piece of information or completed a small task? Giving in to this impulse to cc and bcc sets an expectation of constant contact that actually prevents workers from getting their individual tasks done. This lesson applies to people who work with clients, too; if you e-mail them about every small detail, they will begin to expect that level of hand-holding all the time, even if it multiplies opportunities for miscommunication and eats up time you could be spending on doing your job. If a client is particularly demanding, batch your feedback so you can send an e-mail twice a week that summarizes a number of developments. If you absolutely must create a paper(less) trail, discuss what you are agreeing to do by phone and then send one short follow-up e-mail summarizing what you agreed upon.

Studies have shown that skipping breakfast deprives us of energy for the rest of the day and alters our metabolism. Eating late at night has a reverse effect and can lead to irregular sleep patterns. What we feed our brain at these times has a similar effect on our minds. In Nicholson Baker’s novel
A Box of Matches
, a man starts
his day by lighting a match and meditating for the time it takes the flame to burn out, which puts him in a calmer frame of mind. “What you do first thing can influence your whole day,” he discovers. “If the first thing you do is stump to the computer in your pajamas to check your e-mail, blinking and plucking your proverbs, you’re going to be in a hungry electronic funk all morning,” he says. “So don’t do it.”

Not checking your e-mail first thing will also reinforce a boundary between your work and your private life, which is essential if you want to be fully present in either place. If you check your e-mail before getting to work, you will probably begin to worry about work matters before you actually get there. Checking your e-mail first thing at home doesn’t give you a jump on the workday; it just extends it. Sending e-mail before and after office hours has a compounded effect, since it creates an environment in which workers are tacitly expected to check their e-mail at the same time and squeeze more work out of their tired bodies.

E-mailing at night creates the same workaholic cycle, especially if it is an executive or higher-up doing it. Every company has a boss who is infamous for logging on and sending messages at three in the morning. This is an incredibly destructive habit, since it encourages other employees to prove they are working just as hard, by responding when they should be entering their third REM cycle or sending messages on the road, on vacation, over weekends. If you are one of these early-morning e-mailers, simply put your message into a draft and send it during business hours; if the idea or information you wanted to pass along was essential enough to wake you, it will be no less relevant when you wake up from a decent night’s sleep.

There are, of course, professions in which this rule will be difficult to follow. Investment bankers who depend on keeping
up with foreign markets, reporters who are covering breaking stories, doctors who are operating on a patient in need of a new organ, and political campaign employees who have to keep up with a 24/7 news cycle are just a few examples. They will find it nearly impossible not to check e-mail late at night to coordinate and push projects forward. It’s important to note, however, that all of these professions have very high levels of burnout; if you’re not in one of these jobs but communicate at their frenzied rates, you are applying a false standard to your work environment.

Just living in the new global workplace isn’t a reason to try to keep up the current e-mail pace. Luis Suarez, a social computing evangelist for IBM who lives on the Canary Islands and reports to managers in the United States and Holland, recently decided to wean himself off his e-mail habit. Within a week he found that he had cut back the amount of e-mail in his inbox by 80 percent. He accomplished this by using Web-based free tools such as blogs, where he could post information and make it available to a large group of people; social networking sites, which build trust; and instant messaging, which allows him to interact in real time when it is important. He also just stopped sending a lot of e-mail. Suarez found he got much more done and had more time to enjoy, well, being on the Canary Islands.

Although it is impossible for many of us to imagine, it is possible to check your e-mail far less frequently, even just twice a day, and get more accomplished while doing so. H. L. Mencken checked and answered his mail twice daily and was able to respond to eighty letters because he scheduled the time to do so; there was also a lag time between when his missives went
out and when they arrived, and again if he received a response. If they had been e-mails he was sending, his replies would probably have generated yet more correspondence the same day, as some of the eighty recipients would most likely have written back right away.

It is unlikely that the time it takes e-mails to arrive will ever slow down. Still, following Mencken’s rule will free up large chunks of your day formerly spent fidgeting with e-mail (and creating yet more of it); even so, your messages will arrive exponentially faster than Mencken’s since all of them will get there instantly. You will also be fully present when you get around to sending your messages, rather than fighting between bits and blips of your day. As a result, your e-mail will be more lucid and better designed to get a clean, fast response.

Checking your e-mail twice a day (or even just once an hour) will also allow you to set the agenda for your day, which is essential if you want to stay on task and get things done in a climate of constant communication. How many times do we get so distracted by e-mail that we lose focus and forget there was something very important we had intended to complete during the workday? And then you have to stay late at work, when it’s quiet and e-mail isn’t coming in as fast, to get it done. Checking your e-mail once in the morning and again in the afternoon will allow you to scroll through messages, pull out the urgent ones, add them to your agenda, and respond accordingly. Your to-do list will remain intact and then shrink.

If you work in an environment where many people keep their inboxes open all day, put an automatic return message on your mailbox directing people to contact you through other channels. It can be a simple message and needn’t scold people for using e-mail. WebWorkerDaily cited this message as an example:

Due to a technical issue, there is a possibility I may never see your email. If it is important, please call me at xxx xxx-xxxx.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

For a brief time, this autoreply will create more messages for your correspondents and contacts, but it will quickly train them out of e-mailing you about small or insignificant things, freeing up time for you to do important work and actually become a more useful colleague or contact. If the message is worded correctly, it will also reinforce your availability without cutting off communication. If their needs are important, your friends and colleagues will get in touch with you and your time away from the e-mail Tilt-a-Whirl will allow you to address them more adequately.