Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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 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?