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Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
Gary W. Longsine writes "The Washington Post writes about a Venture Capitalist and blogger, Fred Wilson, who recently declared 'e-mail bankruptcy', wiping out his inbox and starting over because he couldn't keep up. Spam is cited as one reason. There have been several public incidents, some cited in the article, where the flow of email is just too much to keep up. 'If there is a downside to completely turning a back on e-mail, it's not one many former users notice. Stanford computer science professor Donald E. Knuth started using e-mail in 1975 and stopped using it 15 years later. Knuth said he prefers to concentrate on writing books rather than be distracted by the steady stream of communication.' Is email just too hectic a communication form for some people? Is email dead?"
but when I figure it out, I'll shoot you an email.
The joy of email is you don't have to answer it right away. If the email you are getting is keeping you from doing real work, then it's because you being to OC over checking and replying and researching every email that comes your way every 15 minutes. Stop checking it so often and learn to prioritize and it's no longer a distraction.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
"Is email dead?"
No.
I've seen a related phenomenon at least a half-dozen times over the last couple of years. I work in a large organization where lots of people live and die by their email. Lots of computers also means a steady stream of drive failures. Despite all the warnings and training, some people will have no backups. Their entire careers, it seems, are in the contents of the Personal Folders they've created in Outlook and when I tell them it's all irrecoverably gone, they have a panic attack or something close to it.
Then, two days later, I run into them and they invariably tell me the same thing. They say that the loss of all that stored email was liberating. They feel free to work in the current moment instead of following up on old items that nobody *really* cared about anyway.
They were able to concentrate on what was important to their peers and bosses. Why? Because they told those people "All my email is gone; please re-send to me anything important" and found that what they got back was far less than they had been trying to keep track of previously.
I thought this was all very odd until I remembered how I lost my old ccMail files when we transitioned to Exchange so many years ago. I remember the feeling of having dropped the dead weight I'd been carrying for so long.
My point is that, no, email isn't dead. It is, however, an oppressive presence in the life of many people. Throwing it off and starting over, maybe greatly de-emphasizing its role, is not necessarily a bad thing.
Like many things in life some individuals can't cope. Being deluged by spam is a lame excuse - I use GMail - I sign up to all sorts of dubious services with it& have receievd 1 piece of spam so far.
At any time I've over 3 other email addresses, the key rule with them is to check them daily else I'll... get a backlog.
People whinging about email tell more about themselves than email.
So that's why I keep getting all of those Viagra and Cialis spams.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
I find it hard to believe that if you filter out spam, news digests, etc. and are down to personal communications, that you are honestly getting too many unless you're the president. If you are getting that many and you're not being paid enough to hire help, you should seriously reconsider why it is you're getting that many emails. Those add up to a sizeable population and should probably equate to some kind of increase in responsibility, and ergo an increase in pay significant enough to employ an assistant.
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Crow T. Trollbot
I know having 2,500 emails unread would cause me stress. It used to. Here is how I learned to cope:
* POPFile to weed out the overwhelming majority of the spam. If you've got 4 spams to 1 legit email life seems pretty freaking unimaginably difficult, and nowadays my server inboxes are closer to 100 to 1. My actual client inbox is about 1 to 100 thanks to POPFile.
* Automatically filter automated emails (trade confirmations, bank statements, EBay whatever, anything without a human on the line) to a "I will probably never need this but just in case" folder. This generally requires setting up one rule in your client per business you do business with, or if you're like me you double up on the POPFile goodness and tag them all "auto" then just move based on that tag.
* Check email twice per day, moving every email out of the inbox after it is dealt with. Anything left in your inbox should be a pressing work matter -- if not, move it out, its done. In between my scheduled email checks I only fire it up if I'm looking to make some work for myself. If someone thinks they need a response immediately and I care that they think they need a response immediately, then they have my phone number.
* Get on with life.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Since I've started using Gmail spam has been mostly a non-issue. Their spam filter is INCREDIBLY good, I maybe receive unfiltered spam a couple of times a month or so. I've pretty much given up on "heavy client" email apps, such as Thunderbird which I used before then. Now if they provided IMAP access to Gmail and mobile push access like Windows Live it would be perfect.
of course email is still useful, and it always will be
people like Fred Wilson and Donald E. Knuth i think are really just covering for a desire to be less social. which is not a bad instinct if you want to write a book or get some real work done, and to have a good cover story like "my email inbox is chock full, i can't deal with it" is a nice way to brush certain people off who otherwise might get offended
i have 2 email addresses. 1 everyone knows about, and it is usually barely looked at, full of crap that got in my inbox because i needed an email address to sign up for some site, sort-of friends and their useless and retarded forwarded email jokes, recruiters pumping job offers, etc. i'd say i read 1 out of every 25 emails for that address, and barely scan the headlines for the rest
the other address is piped to my blackberry and is paid attention too, as the only people who get it are family, close friends, work, etc
i think that's a good bifurcation to live with: a public email address and a private one. and it's an easy and obvious management idea. anyone could have figured it out
so to play this lame game of skewering email itself is just a cover story for a deeper desire to get away from the constant chatter of life. again, not a bad instinct, but it reveals that "oh noes! email is dead!" is not the real story here, never was, and never will be, even though you will always hear the refrain, time and time again, whenever someone wants to unplug and tell a white lie in order to do that without offending
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Nothing to see here
Email might be dead, but I'm going to keep using it until Netcraft confirms it.
Dead? No. Annoying as shit and wastes a lot of my time? Hell yes.
But then again, so are computers in general, and cell phones, and almost any other modern communication technique that allows you to exchange information instantly. You as a person are expected to instantly reply to that information. That's like declaring the telephone dead 30 years after invention. It's really annoying sometimes, but no where near dead.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
But when it comes to dealing with large quantities of email, the best tactic I find is to delegate. Reply with the standard "Interesting point, what do you think is the best solution?" and then when they get back... "Great!"
Also, I use Thunderbird - I sorely wish someone would develop an addon which ranks email by historical levels of correspondance, length of correspondance, domain, etc.. Those who you write a lot to at length are bound to be more important, and need immediate attention.
The vast majority of people I encounter who complain about "email overload" are the ones still receiving everything into one huge "Inbox" folder initially. Then in most cases, they're manually sorting things out as they read them, placing them in manually created sub-folders.
..." rule. If you regularly do online purchasing with certain vendors, you can automatically dump their emails into a "Web order related" folder, for example.
If they'd take a couple hours out of their busy day, just once, to create some sensible automatic filtering rules in their email client, I suspect it would pay off for most of them pretty quickly.
The truth is, most people receive regular emails from specific addresses, so these could be sorted just by a basic "if mail is from xxx@yyy.com, then
I particularly like the guy at work who walks over to my desk and says, "Hey there, did you get my email?" when he sent it about 30 seconds ago. What the fuck is he doing? Sending me an email so he can come over and talk to me about whatever it is that's in the email and then wasting my time even more?
I've started taking the approach of answering "No, but when I do I'll let you know if there are any questions. Right now I'm kind of busy..." What I really want to do is bitch whip him with my mouse.
When properly used, I like email in that it provides an asynchronous means of communication which does not become time dependent. I can send someone an email at 2:30AM when I happen to awake and just check for an answer later that day or the next. If I really need an instant reply, there's always the phone.
But I do think there are a lot of people in the world who's email is effectively broken because they cannot keep up with the spam that comes in.
Could it get better if there were not so many owned machines?
Right...only old people in Korea use email right?
Seriously...I keep seeing these things about email and I can only guess it comes from people, maybe younger people, that aren't in the working world yet?
In business...email seems to be the #1 form of communication, be it site wide, or even working on projects within a team.
Most every place I work at...blocks IM for security purposes...so, that's not an option.
Outside of work..well, I'd have to say that email is still my main and prefered form of communication. With some exceptions...I don't talk long on a phone, usually just a quick confirmation "Gonna meet at the Bulldog for beers at 4:30? Yup. Ok, see ya there [click]". I often have numerous thoughts throughout the day pertaining to different people, I find it easier to shoot off an email to each one...rather than call right then. If I were to wait till I had enough to call about...I'd likely forget most of the ideas I had...
That being said, I have one friend that is the complete opposite. He works in IT, but, when he leaves work, it is like he cannot stand to touch a computer at home. He actually gets a bit uptight on emails for trying to plan things, etc...he insists on phone calls in person. It is actually a PITA for me with him at times, as that my other friends do quite well with email planning, etc.
I prefer to hang with people in person when I can, but, when I cannot, I prefer email to communicate with them. Pretty much anytime I'm at home or work, I have at *least* one computer up at all times, with email running 100% of the time...I can communicate almost real time with email if I want..and it happens at times...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
When properly used, I like email in that it provides an asynchronous means of communication which does not become time dependent. I can send someone an email at 2:30AM when I happen to awake and just check for an answer later that day or the next. If I really need an instant reply, there's always the phone.
Yes, exactly. That's the beauty of properly used e-mail. This is particularly true on large, collaborative projects (especially if some of the collaborators are in drastically different time zones) and it's nice for personal communication as well, since it gives you time to sit down and really think about what you're going to say.
The problem (besides spam, of course) is that a lot of people seem to regard e-mail as a kind of clunky-but-convenient chat program. They fire back uninformative five-word responses immediately and expect everyone else to do the same. Now, there are times when this kind of back-and-forth may be useful (e.g. exchanging code snippets) but honestly, mostly it's a useless PITA.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.