Nora Ephron has a very funny (and accurate) op-ed piece in yesterday’s NY Times titled The Six Stages of E-Mail. Here’s an excerpt from Stage Four: Disenchantment.
Help! I’m drowning. I have 112 unanswered e-mail messages. I’m a writer – imagine how many unanswered messages I would have if I had a real job. Imagine how much writing I could do if I didn’t have to answer all this e-mail… In the brief time it took me to write this paragraph, three more messages arrived. Now I have 115 unanswered messages. Strike that: 116.
There are an increasing number of people declaring email bankruptcy. The Washington Post had an article on this phenomenon in May titled, E-Mail Reply to All: ‘Leave Me Alone.
The supposed convenience of electronic mail, like so many other innovations of technology, has become too much for some people. Swamped by an unmanageable number of messages — the volume of e-mail traffic has nearly doubled in the past two years, according to research firm DYS Analytics — and plagued by annoying spam and viruses, some users are saying “Enough!”
Those declaring bankruptcy are swearing off e-mail entirely or, more commonly, deleting all old messages and starting fresh. E-mail overload gives many workers the sense that their work is never done, said senior analyst David Ferris, whose firm, Ferris Research, said there were 6 trillion business e-mails sent in 2006. “A lot of people like the feeling that they have everything done at the end of the day,” he said. “They can’t have it anymore.”
I’m tempted to declare email bankruptcy and start over, but I just got the book Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst and I’m going to try his approach first. I’ll post an update by summer’s end on how it goes.
