Slashdot Mirror
E-mail Overload: Welcome Back to School
There is a sense of feeling increasingly overwhelmed by the problems e-mail creates (also acute for people not in college, since the vast majority of Americans are still on dial-up systems). Employers get frustrated because workers spend so much time messaging one another with questions, problems and data sent merely because it's so easy. As we move towards an instantaneous model of communicating information, the pressure on everyone to manage information rises. Most people aren't getting much help.
It's simple to send instructions and directions via e-mail, but tougher to hold people accountable for messages delivered in ways they struggle to sort, absorb and file. It's easy enough -- and true enough -- to tell a boss or professor you didn't get the e-mail, don't remember it, or lost it in the crush. For example: "I get a ton of cover-your-ass e-mail from subordinates now," e-mailed Daniel, an account executive in Chicago. "People used to make decisions because I wasn't available, but now, why should they? My employees just e-mail me every little decision so they can't get into trouble and are rattled if I haven't answered them in five minutes. They are learning via e-mail not to think for themselves, not to be in positions where they can be held accountable. They just instantly message me. I'm personally already overwhelmed with e-mail from my superiors and customers, not to mention my wife and kids, and my fishing buddies have me on a dozen mailing lists about fishing I don't really need to be on."
Sandra Berman, a teaching assistant at an Ivy League school, says e-mail is a growing and problematic factor in her relationships with students. "I'm always getting messages minutes before papers are due telling me they won't be done, as if notifying me constitutes agreement. I get very complex questions about reports and papers phrased in questions and e-mails that are 25 words long. If you ask to meet somebody, they are amazed. When I e-mail people -- it's amazing, but kids don't set up appointments face-to-face much anymore -- they often tell me, 'oh, I didn't know about that deadline or schedule change.' And you know what? It happens to me all the time, so it could well be true. I can't really absorb the e-mail I get, and surely can't figure out how to sort and organize it, so something is getting lost."
The overload seems to be hitting offices and colleges particularly hard. The computer savvy have a fighting chance -- to some extent they can retaliate and cope with alternate accounts and IDs, and with filtering and sorting and blocking systems. But most students at most schools don't yet have the time, opportunity or skills. E-mail and IM systems are no longer optional; they're essential to registration, course work, communications and a social life.
Students complain with e-mail so ubiquitous, they spend hours e-mailing and IM-ing people who live two floors below or in the dorm next door. "I IM for a lunch date, to get pizza, to walk to class, to check on my friends and assignments," says Jane, a junior at the University of Chicago. "It sounds lazy, but it isn't, it's just easier." Jim Bagwell, a University of Michigan senior, says his friends become alarmed if he hasn't replied to their instant messages in a few minutes. "They think I'm in trouble, or having tech problems. Sometimes they get pissed off. They e-mail me and call me up to ask if I'm on or have gotten their messages. I'm answering messages as fast as I can, because I know people are waiting. I don't meet with professors anymore because they all are online now, and it's easier for them and me to talk through e-mail. I get so many e-mails they back up if I don't check them every few hours ... I'm becoming something of a slave to it. It's a grind. Over the summer, two friends and I went hiking in Canada. We couldn't believe what was waiting for us when we got back."
Bagwell said in some cases, friends were worried or offended that he hadn't replied in two weeks. He lost the chance to join some college groups because people assumed he wasn't interested, since he had taken so long to reply. "You ought to be able to go on a hike without freaking out everybody you know." There are no universally-shared notions of etiquette regarding e-mail, and, as a result, says Bagwell, he and his friends become somewhat compulsive about checking it. "Definitely, the stress level goes up when I'm not near a computer for a couple of hours. That can be hard on work and peace of mind.The consequences and expectation surrounding e-mail are deeper than people realize," he said. "I'm really think twice before going offline for two weeks again, especially when I get a real job. That makes me a POW."
As people get spammed and flamed, their inboxes clog with messages, partially- read documents, conversational threads and URL's. Important messages can get lost or overlooked -- in fact a growing number of messages are believed to be vanishing in the e-mail overload, ignored, forgotten or overlooked. Even for people with sophisticated sorting and organizing systems, managing an inbox has become increasingly complex. Unlike s-mail, there isn't the certain expectation that messages were sent or received.
"There are many levels on which e-mail affects communications," says Jay, a Stanford graduate assistant studying the social implications of E-mail Overload (he will finish his report next year, and we'll post it). "For one thing, people increasingly expect that people won't read or have the time to respond to e-mail. For another, we tend to rush our messages, since we are always afraid of falling behind. That leads to misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and just poor communicating. People format messages differently, so parts of messages are often missed or not seen at all. Others send multiple messages because they are e-mailing so impulsively they're always correcting or clarifying themselves. That's dangerous in personal relationships and business. There is now a frantic, hurried quality to e-mail communications that is getting worse by the year, as the number of people and businesses online grows."
Like Bagwell, people who use computing in their school, work or personal lives can find themselves inundated with messages if they're offline for even a few hours or days. It's not clear when conversations begin -- or when they should and do end. People who come online for the first time often express surprise at the brusque nature of many e-mail communications, since they don't yet know how cluttered their inboxes will become. E-mail has created a culture of such instant response that messagers expect instantaneous replies. Bosses expect employees to be online regularly, sometimes even in off-hours. E-mail alters the nature and content of communications. Letter-writing -- a nearly dead form of culture all by itself -- requires time to construct messages, while recipients have hours or days to consider their replies. Letter writers often put the same time and energy into writing that gamers or programmers put into their work and entertainment. Ordinary mail also makes advertising and marketing material easy to distinguish from personal communications; junk mail is easy to spot and toss. Now, spam often comes disguised as personal e-mail, with individualistic headings, an approach I consider close to fraud.
E-mail is responsible for the growth of distributed organizations, obviously, and it permits people to communicate easily and cheaply across geographical and time differences. But we know little about how people organize and manage the large amounts of information so many receive.
Look for more on this topic in an upcoming column.
> This is the first time in human history
> disparate people in diverse places can
> communicate with one another instantaneously.
So I guess I imagined my mother calling her Swedish uncles when I was a kid, eh?
"I IM for a lunch date, to get pizza, to walk to class, to check on my friends and assignments,"
::sigh::
I once dated a girl that did this extensivly. It was a huge annoyance, of sorts. I'd have to go to "afk" status, or just plain ignore her (which virtually guaranteed me trouble later..) when I wanted 3 minutes to myself.
_14k4 (poorheart.com)
At the large company where I used to work, one of my friends had just gotten hired on and happened to notice that I had 4000 unread messages in my inbox. He couldn't believe his eyes. Now, he's been there over a year and he's pushing 2000 on a regular basis. From firsthand experience, I can tell you that this is a sick way to live.
:/
How do you get 4000 unread messages you ask? Well, you only have so much time, so you skim through your mail reading the most obvioulsy important and "saving the rest for later". Repeat for many months, and viola, you can't look at your email without feeling a sense of guilt and dread. Then, once a year or so I would hold my breath, select all and delete. Aaaah.
But I've broken the cycle. Now I get all of my mail thanks to my Crackberry pager. I'm pretty sure that is even a sicker lifestyle, but what can you do?
Invisible Agent
This post is a mirror; when a monkey stares in, no hacker gazes out.
Writing a story about how email affects people to a bunch of nerds that have been using email since the old BBS's??
What kind of comment am I supposed to post here?
Email has affected me!
Its worse than preaching to a choir, its insane. I imagine that there are good stories being rejected so I can spend time reading this story.
And the worse part, its a multipart Katz column!!
To quote Billy Madison:
We are all dumber having read this.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
You've got to be kidding.
Anyone reading Slashdot that hasn't learned to manage their email by now is probably a lost cause.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
This comment, from one of the people quoted in the article:
... it's not all a bed of roses. Desk telephones were just as anoying before e-mail became as widespread, and in some ways e-mail is easier to manage because you can ignore the crap. Until you pick up a ringing phone you do not (generally) know what the subject matter is, and if it has a higher priority than your current task.
;-)
I'm really think twice before going offline for two weeks again, especially when I get a real job....
is absolutely ludicrous! Use Out of Office reply for gawds sake.
People have to start taking responsibility for their own actions and life
I do think however, that it would be nice in a mail client to know whether a message was:
Sent directly to you, CC'd, or as part of a mass-mail before actually reading it. Outlook can't do it, so that's me stuffed
Disclaimer: I know it can be set up using Rules, I just can't be bothered.
Granted, USENET has its share of problems. It's hard to create groups/run a server and the S/N ration can get very low. Perhaps a slightly tweaked version is needed.
Moderation helps but places a large burden on the moderator. Mailing lists (at least the ones I subscribe to) don't seem to have a SPAM problem nearly as large as on USENET. Perhaps because it's easy to set up a mailing list that requires registration to post. Why doesn't USENET have anything like that?
It's a complete waste of resources to have everyone in a domain store separate copies of discussion messages when one USENET archive could be available to all.
What's the trick? Why do most software projects (for example) use mailing lists rather than USENET? How can we take back USENET?
"How do you get 4000 unread messages you ask? Well, you only have so much time, so you skim through your mail reading the most obvioulsy important and "saving the rest for later". Repeat for many months, and viola, you can't look at your email without feeling a sense of guilt and dread. Then, once a year or so I would hold my breath, select all and delete. Aaaah."
That just makes me wince I wonder how many people like this it takes until email will get a genuinely good rep as a communications medium.
You know what I mean. If you send an email to some places/persons you usually get almost nothing back. A letter is needed. It's more official and people tend unfortunately take you more seriously.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the convenience that email offers, but I think we should limit it's use so that our "digital addiction" does not progress to unhealthy levels. We need to learn how to balance our computer usage with genuine person-to-person communication, lest we become totally dependant on computers.
Also, Katz spelled email wrong. There is no hyphen in email.
"his friends become alarmed if he hasn't replied to their instant messages in a few minutes"
Seriously folks, if your friends get freaked out because you're not online, then you need to find some new friends. I think Katz is just isolating the extreme cases here and making it sound like an epidemic (typical on the nightly news.) If you can't figure out how to put yourself into "offline" or "away" mode to avoid the IM's, then you deserve what you get.
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
'I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.'
--- Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker
--
A member of the first GPL-ed software project in my country
I guess I don't see the same problems as these people. I can and do live entirely without IM, so I know that's possible. As far as email goes, it sounds like people are making assumptions about the synchronicity of communication that aren't warranted. If you reply to people too quickly, then of course they assume that you will always do so. What works for me is to check fairly frequently, but put off most replies until two or three central times a day in batch mode. That way, you get the important information quickly, but without creating the expectation that you'll act immediately on everything you're sent.
I knew people in school who checked their email every hour or so; I found it amazing that they would do so. Then again, I've never been quite the social butterfly. Maybe that's why I have a hard time sympathizing with those who are :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I don't really understand what this article is about. Yes people use email, its quite useful. We have some examples of people on University campuses who don't use it wisely ... big deal.
The example of the proffesor who gets emails just before papers are due saying they aren't going to be done: So what? Can this professor not stand up in front of her class and tell her students that practice is not acceptable and will be met with a failing grade?
Blaming email for the above problems is like blaming knives and guns for killing people rather than the people who kill people. Blame this on human laziness/impatience/ignorance/stupidity but not on email. Email is a tool.
As far as people not being ready for instantanious communication... well we've been doing some form of it since smoke signals were invented, or for that matter language. I really don't see what distance has to do with it and I'm not going to give up all form of communication anytime soon.
The Anti-Blog
Indeed. As CTO of a company that employs about 100 people I clearly see a division between:
a) the "old guys". They consider email a mail equivalent: you check it once a day and ask your secretary to reply. They see 'too much mail' as 'way too much noise'. These are CFO-types and older sales manager types.
b) The "e-kids". They are younger (typically 35) and consider email a bonus, and see it as akin to the telephone. I.e. it has become a real-time mechanism. They have developed mechanisms to handle the deluge, such as the following (which I am trying to get everyone to buy into)
- Filter into separate directories upon receipt
- Check each minute instead of once an hour (or worse)
- Show the TO line in the list view of received emails
- Live with the fact that sometimes you cannot answer each one immediately, or ever
- Use various email addresses to separate business from private
- Use email aliases and groups were they benefit the project
- concentrate on the half that needs doing quickly: spend 10-20% of your time on that. Spend remaining 80-90% of your time on strategy. Typically, half or more of the emails need not be answered at all.
- Keep received and sent email for three months, no longer (for legal reasons too btw).
- Use ASCII, not HTML
I send a weekly newsletter that always has a few tips, and often sit down with older or less sophisticated managers individually to teach them some of the tricks. That helps a lot, I find.
Michael
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
in the corperate world it's worse...
3-20 meg Power point prenentations, Mpeg video files, 3-4 meg spreadsheets, and 5-10 meg doc files..... for what? conveying information? noo, the info is only 10% of the file size, the rest is bloat and eye-candy. Your power point presentation doesnt need a WAV of turbo-lover to be effective, your spreadsheet don't need a 3 meg bmp in the background as a watermark to make it work, and your letter didn't need a 3 meg Photo of your head resized to 1X3 inches on your letterhead.
Everyone whines about mp3's and warez are soaking up email bandwidth, it's the lusers and sales people jamming it up with useless drivel disguized as important communication... the file attachment was the #1 worst thing to have ever added to email.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So email a copy of this article to all your friends.
Probably the most important thing I've realized with the "advances" - instant messaging, phone mail, email, relay - is the ability to just say no.
Yes, it sounds trite. But next time the phone rings (cell or otherwise) during your personal time - don't answer it. I make it a point not to answer my cell phone while I'm at lunch, or in the restroom. If it's really important, they'll leave a message or call back.
It's something that actually takes some effort, because all of these devices were formed to say "Notice me! Pay attention to me!" But there is a time and a place for all things (Moderation in Everything is almost becoming my mantra).
If people can not handle this - then perhaps they need to learn to let go too.
Of course, I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
It's being overused to the point that it's being used as a substitute for face to face and voice communication.
.com layoffs. In stead of a director/manager standing in front of you having to answer tough questions, they just de-activate your security badge, throw your stuff out the window and escort you to your car.
I've seen it used in situations where people are too afraid to deliver bad news or get in a possibly heated confrontation that they just fire an email off without thinking. One example is the
E-mail is great for factual information but is very poor at conveying feelings or the tone of the person.
So now we have people sending out BCE (SPAM) that the customers end up paying for, Passive people using it as a substitute for face to face conversation, and enormous amounts of useless information (read CC: & FW).
Of course there are always exceptions to the rule.
I have to say that one of the nicest things for me is that I observe the Jewish Sabbath, and from Friday Sundown to Saturday Sundown I don't touch my computer or phone or TV. I totaly forget my email. I don't worry about my bills or anything else. There is nothing so important in my email that it can't wait until sunday.
Thankfuly the biggest list I'm on is mostly of people who observe the Sabbath, so it goes to about 0 for that day anyhow.
But try it sometime, take a day off from the modern world, its nice. And it gives you a nice chance to have a conversation face to face.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
hell? I don't get it, am I the only one here who doesn't have problems managing their email? I maintain two seperate accounts, one at work and one at home. My employer doesn't have my home email address, and the work account never gets used for anything personal, or even checked outside of 8-5 Mon-Fri. On both accounts I use procmail + pine to keep everything sorted and undercontrol. Lists get pre-sorted into their folders by procmail, and most spam gets caught by Postfix via RBL's (at home at least where I run the server, my employer is currently listed as an open-relay on orbz but that's a different story...) and what little spam that does get through is pretty obvisous and get sent to spamcop right quick. With all the filters in place only direct messages to me hit my inbox, and email stays at a managable level, lists get read only when I have the time to spare.
;-> I'd love to have a different box for magazines, for bills, for personal mail and a spam filter. Yes I know I can write to the bastards at the direct marketing assoc and get off their mailing lists but that's far more effort than blocking 'net spam is.
Now I have no such filters on my snailmail so things get all muddled and tend to pile up. I have s huge stack of magazines, mixed with bills (thank $DIETY that I pay everything but rent electronically!), paper spam and the odd once a month actual letter. I get credit card offers disguised as bills or personal letters or checks, I get magazine offers disguised as all sorts of prizes and contests, some require more than a second glance to sort from the legit email. And for some reason my postman refuses to honor the procmial recipe I taped to the inside of my mailbox
For me the S/N ratio is far worse for snailmail than it is for email because I have less control and less options to automate the sorting process. Plus replying costs money, and takes far more effort than hitting ctrl-x in Pine. Now I realize I have it lucky being a geek, I have finer grained control that most "normal" people do, but it doesn't take much effort for even a normal college student type of open up a couple of different free accounts to help sort things, and any of the free POP3 clients allow you to auto-sort mail with almost the same level of control you get with procmail, it just requires you to sit down for an hour or two and do it once, and save yourself hundreds of hours down the road in wasted time.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
When I first started reading /., I wondered why whenever JonKatz posted the only things that got modded up were well-written flames against him and not the article.
Well, now I see why. Jon, your article is interesting but you're writing to the wrong crowd. I know how to use e-mail as a tool, the way it was intended. What you're talking about is more suited for the non-geek masses who don't. Take for example that teacher's e-mail issues. Her problem is not so much that students are turning to e-mail but that she's not understanding how to manage it. E-mail doesn't change anything in this instance. Before e-mail I'm sure she got phone calls telling her the same thing.
I personally see e-mail as more managable than phone calls. I can file things away and archive the important stuff for as long as I need it. Today's PIMs are an awesome tool. Think about this: a school district. The students are using Evolution to manage their calendar and e-mail. Imagine the power a teacher has, being able to post assignment dates and so forth on their calendars. No excuses, the PIM doesn't lie. Every student can pull up their assignments for the next few days, no excuses.
In short, e-mail is a tool. Learn to use it.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
(From 'The Dilbert Future')
For every good trend, and unexpected bad trend occurs to neutralize it. For example:
Good Trends:
Computers allow us to work 200 percent faster
Women gain more political influence
Pop Music continues to get better
Unexpected Bad Trends:
Computers generate 300 percent more work
Women are as dumb as men
I get old
./er, but it does irk me sometimes that the new advance in studio recording technology I just bought will make the standard of excellence that much higher. Maybe I might become a member of the pen and pencil club just yet. Ha.
Nothing too profound here, but it applies well to this situation. Email, Word Processing, IDEs, Cell Phones, and all sorts of unbridled access to information and communication were invented to help us gain more control, but often times they serve equally to bring more chaos into our lives, either through increased expectations or simply complication. Don't get me wrong, I love new technology as much as any other
All we all need is Microsoft to introduce a new email variant where the sending party is charged for each email sent, hence diminishing the wish of users to impose unnecessary noise.
I to was once at a loss when it came to handling email. I didn't know what to do with the tool.
Since then I have discovered that email is a wonderful tool for getting in trouble while drunk. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of ways to get in trouble operating a computer while drunk. I currently have a Compaq Proliant 6500 sitting in my bedroom due to a drunken visit to ebay. But email is much more effective. In my time, I've managed to let a heavily armed coworker know that I wished to knot and couple like frogs in a cistern. This, of course got me fired. I also managed to challenge ESR to a duel and notify our beloved Malda that his girlfriend is a beast.
After enough of these episodes, I've come to realize that this is the real purpose of email. To let you say those things you only say while drunk to anyone at any time.
Truly a marvelous invention Mr. Katz, I wonder that you did not touch on this aspect.
Your friend,
--Shoeboy
Why does every email client feel the need to re-invent the vacation(1) program? Holy fuck, people, it's 8 years old!
The problem with Outlost's Out-of-Office Autoreply is that as far as we can tell, it bypasses all the Rules settings. So even if you have the Rules set up to be a poor imitation of procmail (oh look, another reinvention of the wheel -- why can't Rules do what procmail has done for years?), and your mailing list traffic is redirected to various folders, too bad. The OoO Autoreply takes precedence, and sends replies to lists traffic. Really really annoying.
After about a week of messing with Rules, OoO, and general Outlook stupidity, we moved everything to a Unix box. Procmail is far smarter than anything that can possibly run on Outlook right now, and mutt as a mail client will do all the things you asked for in your post.
End of rant. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
When have human beings *ever* been 'ready' for a revolution in the way they do things? Were people 'ready' for the telephone? The radio? The television? The automobile?
Nope. All these things caused upheavals and grumblings when they appeared on the scene. Hell, we're still figuring out what to do with television after 50 years!
The difference is, we're a bit more self-conscious, these days. We study ourselves, not just in the past but in the present and, when possible, future tenses. We fool ourselves into believing that we *can* be in control, and therefore it follows that we *should* be in control.
But we never *have* been in control. Innovations happen to us, and then we figure out what it means afterward.
Mikey,
E-mail Junkie.
"Hey...you've got weasels on your face" -- Weird Al
Just to let you know that I wil be out of the office until 1pm MST. Your email is important to me and I will respond as soon as I can.
just don't answer the email.
:)
I have a list of friends that I send mail to on occassion, some more than others. I know which ones are likely to respond in 5 minutes and which ones I may wait a couple days for.
When you answer your email immediately and don't filter or take your time, your correspondents will pick up on it. If they get the feeling that you only check only once every day or so, they won't expect an immediate response. If you don't want the stress, don't introduce it in the first place.
(This strategy also worked well in school. High test scores lead to high expectations. Mediocre scores lead to a normal life.
Since when does "usage, volume and demographics" fall under "social and psychological impact"?
And how is it "surprisingly little"? Compared to what? How much we know about the psychological impact of postal letters?
Why does Katz always sound like he's trying for a Unit 5 Investigation during sweeps week?
JonKatz's Secretary: Mr. Katz you have a telephone call on line one.
JonKatz: Who is it?
JonKatz's Secretary: It's a Mr. Alexander Graham Bell
JonKatz: Well what does he want?
JonKatz's Secretary: I dunno... he seems a little crazy... something about rolling over in a grave...
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
The same applies to Slashdot posts also!
- adam
P.S. Wait a minute, that was a Jon Katz article that was topical, insightful, well-argued...what is going on here?!?!?
I should clarify. I was in a hurry.
Yes, check each minute BUT:
a) turn off the sound!
b) use this to use your off minutes effectively. That means e.g. if you have 7 minutes till your next appointment comes in, glance at your inbox then to use that time effectively, and email is already sitting in it waiting.
I am certainly NOT propagating you jump every minute, and I should have made that clear, sorry.
Michael
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
It amazes me that a lot of office workers don't consider this option. It's like only having a work-provided telephone, or a single mailing address where the letter from your aunt is mixed in with the latest HR newsletter.
When I leave the office on Friday, my work email stays there. There are escalation procedures if they need to contact me in a true emergency, but I don't respond to the minor problems. When I return to work, I check my email 2-3 times a day. If you respond to the inbox bell with pablovian conditioning, you won't get anything done. I read email, decide on the most important thing to do next, then do it. I don't check email until it's done or I'm at a good stopping point. Yes, there are the panicky nitwits who call if I don't respond in 5 minutes. It only takes a few rounds of "Is this really so important that it can't wait an hour?" followed by "I just read the message, and it CAN wait an hour. Click." before they get the point.
I treat personal email the same way. My friends know my phone number, and they know that I might not check or respond to email immediately. It confuses some of them, but they cope. They understand that I have two addresses, and if they send me something at 10:00am, I'm not going to read it until 6:00pm or whenever I'm not at work any more.
You just need to learn to break the cycle. I spend all day on the computer. I used to be a slave to my email. It was burning me out, so I stopped. The transition will piss a few people off, but in the end, you'll be happier and more productive if you don't check your email every few minutes.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
Yes, if you are running the mailserver. With more recent versions of sendmail, there is a "access" file, which should be your first line defense in the prevention of relay-rape. With this file you also block by individual IP address, IP range (class A, B, or C) or by domain name. On my mail server I filter out about 98% of spam directed to me with this method. This can cause problems, because it is pretty easy to block legitamate mail this way- unless the person trying to contact you has an alternate channel to get to you, you'll never even know they are trying to contact you.
Haven't you ever heard of a conference call?
Why would you need 3 minutes to yourself when you've got a girlfriend?
Here's how I handle email. Keep your inbox empty. When you come to your email you probably have some messages in your inbox. Decide if you need to read something. If not, delete it (spam, stupid forwards). After you read it, decide what you want to do about it. If you need to take some action on it, and it will take less than 2 minutes, do it now. Some messages the only action was to read and enjoy or benefit from the information, but now you can delete it. Other quick actions are to mark appointments on a calendar, put something on your project list, or otherwise capture the relevant information. Other things that need to be done, but must be done in some other context (location or time). Move messages that you want to act on into an "@action" folder. (The @ puts it at the top of the list of mail folders usually.) Review this folder regularly. You can move messages to reference folders, but prefer deletion over storage. Also, get off as many mailing lists as you can.
Credits: Ideas mostly taken from here.
to Email slavery.
1. Treat your email address with the same respect you would give your phone number - only give it out when necessary.
2. Send "remove" replies to spam. It only takes a few seconds and it actually works enough of the time to be worth the few seconds.
3. Check your email only a couple times a day, and let people know that's what you do when you give them your email. Of course, there will be times when something urgent is happening and you will have to break this rule, but most people won't know when that's happening and won't depend on it.
4. For urgent items, have important people use other means to contact you that don't keep you tied to a computer, such as phone, cell phone, pager, ham radio, smoke signals, etc. Less important people can wait for their replies. When I was in college 25 years ago, we had neither email nor cell phones, but somehow urgent things got taken care of.
Use opt-in email. Set up procmail filter rules to your main mailbox where you only put people whose email you consider worthwhile. Dump the unknowns in a low priority mailbox (or /dev/null, or autorespond). Mailing lists as usual in their own boxes.
He is more concise and he offers some simple rules that would help stem the tide if everyone abided by them.
The meat of his point is summed up in the following paragraph:
Just because we have become electronically interconnected, we have not acquired the automatic right to send a message to anyone we wish, nor the automatic obligation to respond to every message we receive.
Here, here!
It's all about convenience. Sure there are other ways to do it, but are they nearly as easy? Nope. Remember that the majority of the people using the Internet are not technically inclined. The rest of us have to come up with ways to deal with that fact.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
"I think you read his response backwards. He meant to say keep mail for only 3 months unless you have messages for which it would be advantageous legally to keep them longer"
Strangely enough, no. People say lots of things in e-mail that they (a) did not intend to say (b) did not realize they had said (c) were not authorized to say (d) wish they hadn't said.
If you go through your mailbox and delete a bunch of stuff the night before the lawyer arrives to take your deposition, you are probably guilty of a whole bunch of crimes.
But, if your company has a documented, published, _enforced_ procedure for deleting ALL e-mail more than 3 months old, then they (and you) can at least attempt to argue in court that e-mail is not intended to be an 'official company record'. You probably won't succeed, but at least you won't have committed any crime.
But keep just one of those puppies past 3 months, and it's hello county jail.
sPh
Say what? Let's see, I started college 17 years ago. Even before this newfangled "Internet" thing I had access to BITNET, which was a world-wide network of university computers. Guess what? That gave me email, file transfer, and chat (in the form of "relay", the precursor to IRC).
This year, the daughter of one of my college chums is a freshman. That means we've had an entire generation to cope with world-wide instantaneous communication via the computer nets. I have a hard time believing this is anything new.
And as for college kids not coping well... In my day we also had kids "not cope well" with being on their own and not having a mommy to make them do their homework. Hacky-sack, sports, drinking, fraternities, and just plain goofing-off provided plenty of opportunity to flunk out.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
...but no more. I used to post angry replies when people flamed Katz, thinking this was a damn cheeky way to treat a site admin. No more. This article is so - what's the word - sensationalized, there we go, sensationalized. Katz is trying, consciously or not, to stir up problems where most people have none. It's absurd and irresponsible. I will now be blocking all articles by Jon Katz. Join me, and maybe he'll go away.
I'm the stranger...posting to
That's right, it is still possible to email Donald Knuth. With my new E2P (electronic-to-postal) communications protocol, your message will automatically be converted from email to printed postal mail and forwarded (physically!) to Prof. Knuth. This allows everyone the best of both worlds: you get the convenience of instant electronic communications, and Dr. Knuth will get it in a "paper" format consistent with his chosen inbox.
So fire away those emails to Donald Knuth. For now, you may send them directly to me for processing in my E2P environment. For faster processing (and fewer "what the fsck are you talking about" replies), be sure to use the subject "Dear Dr. Knuth" in your messages.
I might even submit this to W3C as a new communications protocol if it really takes off. HOWEVER, please note that, unlike other internet protocols, there is a *per-transaction fee* associated with E2P. Along with the email note, please send USD 0.00007 per byte (35 cents per page) to cover processing costs. Payment may be sent via PayPal or any other internet micropayment agent of your choice.
Thanks for choosing E2P!
It seems to me that when things get out of control, technologicall illiterate people are easily overwhelmed and often begin to complain - without considering any recourse they could take to eliminate their problems. Chastize your employees for sending meaningless e-mails, and be forgiving if they took the slightly-less-optimal path when faced with a tough decision in a pinch. That could work wonders for halting the thousand "cover-your-ass" e-mails each day from your subordinates.
I work at a fairly large (2,000+ employees on-site) company, and I don't get much unsolicited e-mail from my co-workers. Admittedly, I get more company newsletters that I'd like to, but any "fun mail" that I get is generally by choice. If I take part in the "Did you see that hilarious video about...?" conversations, I get the video in my inbox. I'm not going to offend anyone if I decline their offer to send it to me, either.
I'm also a college student in Computer Engineering, and I feel that I have successfully (and rather easily) avoided "E-Mail Overload." Message filters are a built-in (and vital) component of any decent mail program. Mass school mail goes in a folder that I read if I have time. Mailing list mail goes in a seperate (and usually categorized) folder. You get the point.
Most teachers I've dealt with (yes, outside the engineering school, too) seem to have their communication systems under control as well. Rules are rules, and e-mail doesn't change the rules. None of my classmates or colleagues would assume they have a homework extension because they simply e-mailed the professor the day the homework was due. We know it doesn't work like that.
We may have to be hard-nosed, but it is our individual responsibility to create a standard for our own communications. I quite often reply to my friends' e-mail with my own, but I also respond to e-mail with telephone calls or visits (if it's not too impertinent). Each of my friends has their own standard for cyber-communications as well. I respect the manner in which they choose to deal with my e-mail, and they do the same for me. If your friends freak out because you don't reply within minutes, you're the only one to blame. That's the standard you've set for yourself.
Saturday, Donny, is Shabbos, the Jewish day of rest. That means I don't work, I don't drive a car, I don't fucking ride in a car, I don't handle money, I don't turn on the oven, and I sure as shit DON'T FUCKING ROLL!
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
People say lots of things in e-mail that they (a) did not intend to say (b) did not realize they had said (c) were not authorized to say (d) wish they hadn't said.
,year's on most current hardware.
You understood exactly what I was trying to say. INdeed, a policy of three months only protects you. Imagine you ever get sued and you then have to hand over a years email - you would scarcely recall it all, less still remember what you meant when you said XYZ back in January. Best avoid the issue.
Also, as a side benefit. it is easier to search through 3 months mail than through a
Michael
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
Your friends are less paranoid than I am. I routinely deny return receipt requests.
Now I'm starting to rant. I before E except after C. It's not too hard.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Yup. You're using Pegasus or one of its relatives, I see.
Even the 'mail has arrived' requires a compliant MTA at the other end. Something I don't run. (Okay, my mail server doubles as a TV stand. Sue me. :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore