by Randall Stross The New York Times
E-mail has become the bane of some people’s professional lives. Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering new Internet companies, last month stared balefully at his inbox, with 2,433 unread e-mail messages, not counting 721 messages awaiting his attention in Facebook.
Arrington might be tempted to purge his inbox and start afresh — the phrase “e-mail bankruptcy” has been with us since at least 2002. But he declares e-mail bankruptcy regularly, to no avail. New messages swiftly replace those that are deleted unread.For most of us who are not prominent bloggers, our inbox, thankfully, will never become quite so crowded, at least with nonspam messages. But it does not take all that many to seem overwhelming — for me, the sight of two dozen messages awaiting individal responses makes me perspire.
Eventually, someone will come up with software that greatly eases the burden of managing a high volume of e-mail. But in the meantime, we perhaps should look to the past and see what tips we might draw from prolific letter writers in the pre-electronic era who handled ridiculously large volumes of correspondence without being crushed. (…)
We all can learn from H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), the journalist and essayist. Mencken adhered to the most basic of social principles: reciprocity. If someone wrote to him, he believed writing back was, in his words, “only decent politeness.” He reasoned that if it were he who had initiated correspondence, he would expect the same courtesy. “If I write to a man on any proper business and he fails to answer me at once, I set him down as a boor and an ass.”
Whether the post brought 10 or 80 letters, Mencken read and answered them all the same day. He said, “My mail is so large that if I let it accumulate for even a few days, it would swamp me.” Yet at the same time that Mencken teaches us the importance of avoiding overnight e-mail indebtedness, he also reminds us of the need to shield ourselves from incessant distractions during the day when individual messages arrive. The postal service used to pick up and deliver mail twice a day, which was frequent enough to permit Mencken to arrange to meet a friend on the same day that he extended the invitation. Yet it was not so frequent as to interrupt his work.
Today’s advice from time-management specialists, to keep our e-mail software off, except for twice-a-day checks, replicates the cadence of twice-a-day postal deliveries in Mencken’s time. We can handle more e-mail than we think we can, but should do so by attending to it only infrequently, at times of our own choosing.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/20/business/digi21.php
7 Responses to “Excepts from ” Punch line for a digital age: Take my e-mail. Please!””
Comment Page 1 of 11
Emails are nice,
but nothing beats a real handwritten letter.
It costs a little bit more time, but it's
been more thought behind it too…or?
And emails - who is saving them, even if
only on CD-ROM's? Paperletters from my
grandparents… loveletters..
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I thank you for the tip on Merlin Mann. Any time savers for managing email are very well appreciated. I like to use folders for sorting but now that is getting out of hand.
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Emails are nice,
but nothing beats a real handwritten letter.
It costs a little bit more time, but it’s
been more thought behind it too…or?
And emails - who is saving them, even if
only on CD-ROM’s? Paperletters from my
grandparents… loveletters..
[Reply]
There’s a nice Google talk by Merlin Mann about how to manage modern email. It’s called Inbox Zero.
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I wonder if E-Mail, as a form of communication, would be so popular if it were not so cheap….? It is paradox that many humans only value something if is has a hight price?! There are positive and negative aspects to all things in life. Good organisation and discipline are paramount to controlling office stress. This includes the discipline of making choices, to answer immediately or not at all ;-)
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hmm Tania…i like that movie too
love
Agnieszka
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Time management is very important,you can end up checking things all day long .Once a day is fine to check your mail .Email is such a good way to communicate with people instead of snail mail as they call it .And yes it is polite to reply to someone if they write to you ,just as you would return a phone call same applies its Common courtesy .Email is the way …it replaces alot of faxes and ph calls plus you can delete messages when you are finished without the paper trail …and it saves trees .. I love that movie -YOU”VE GOT MAIL …Blessings Tania
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