The Last Word On Nothing

In 2015, I thought my email was out of control. Hahahahahaha. When I remember back to 2015, all I can think is… girl, you have no idea. But back to email: I recently went almost a week without receiving emails from my work address. I didn’t notice that my email program had developed a glitch, because it took that long for me to miss an email I cared about. It’s gotten to where I don’t even open half the messages that land in my inbox. Every time I’ve used one of those timers to log where I spend my time, I find that email is the biggest time suck. Which is why I am offline this week. I’m taking a much-needed vacation to somewhere far away, and I’m logging off of email and all those other distractions on the internet. It’s quite possible that I’ll just delete all the emails that came in while I was gone. Life is ephemeral, and it seems silly to let email take up so much of my attention. When I return from vacation, I might spend half a day slogging through the emails that arrived and the other half of a day rebuilding some of those filters and tools that once helped me make email more manageable. Or, I might just spend that time outside inhaling some fresh air and soaking up a little sunshine. In the meantime, here’s what I wrote about email in 2015.

It’s not my imagination. Even gmail is telling me that my email is out of control, threatening that if I don’t dump some of my tens of thousands of emails (or pay them money) I will be “unable to send or receive emails.” That’s starting to sound appealing. I’ve caught myself fantasizing about creating an auto reply: sorry world, email no longer works for me. If it’s important, find me another way.

On November 30, I had 78,787 unread emails in my main email account. Today, that number is up to 78,929. Do the math and that works out to 142 unread emails in eight days, or just under 18 per day. Which does’t sound so bad, until you consider that this is just one of my five email accounts — the one with the best wheat to chaff ratio.

Looking for a solution, I searched the internet for “how to get email under control.” Google returned about 440,000,000 results, and after reading numerous articles extolling the virtues of simply deleting junk mail, I gave up. My problem isn’t deleting unwanted emails. It’s finding and triaging the important ones.

For many years, I had my email reasonably tamed. I used Apple’s mail.app to manage my various email accounts, and over time, I set up more than 150 filters, which categorized messages and sent them to separate mailboxes. I had a mailbox for press releases, one for embargoed journal articles, another for receipts, and ones for mailing lists and chat groups. Then I upgraded to a new operating system, and mail.app stopped working. Message counts were no longer accurate, and some of my mail stopped going to the correct place. Though they were supposed to synch, mail I read on my phone suddenly disappeared from my computers, and important emails went missing altogether.

After multiple recent occasions where I’ve completely missed important emails, I’ve started to feel a bit paranoid. It’s not just personal email either. I’d been at my current job for more than half a year before I learned that I wasn’t losing my mind. The old emails I couldn’t find had vanished for a reason — the corporate policy was to dump all messages after three months. This revelation left me peeved for a few seconds, after which I was overwhelmed with relief. Permission to lose emails — it felt like a get out of jail free card.

The most stressful thing about email is keeping track of the ones you actually want to read and respond to when you have more time (which is always wishful thinking, of course). Some emails are easy to answer in the moment. But some require more consideration or regard things that are potentially important, but not urgent. Maybe it’s a source telling me about a new paper coming out in several weeks or a story idea that I may want to file away for future reference. The question is: what do I do with such a message so that it doesn’t get buried in the onslaught of new mail? How do I set it aside in a way that I’ll find it when I need it, or, more importantly, remember that it’s even there?

My crude system has become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of messages. Such is the tyranny of the digital age — the firehose spits out information too fast for any human to keep up.

And then there’s the problem of time and attention. For me, the most stressful messages are ones I actually want to respond to. In particular, the notes from people I care about, where I want to craft a thoughtful reply that requires more time than I have at the moment. When I set a message like this aside, it’s always with the best intentions. But when I find a partially written reply in my draft box weeks later, I tend to feel even more paralyzed and awful for taking so long to respond. At some point, it becomes easier to cringe and pretend the original message never existed.

Even worse are those messages that deserve a reply, but are so uncomfortable that it’s easier to put them off than answer them. For instance, the messages from well-meaning friends of friends who have sent me a story they hope that I can help them publish here at LWON, or at FiveThirtyEight or some other place where I have connections. Oh, how I hate crushing dreams.

Clearly, I need an intervention, but what? Email Forgiveness Day could help me deal with those emails I inadvertently ghosted, but it’s only once a year — April 30th. What I really need is a new system for dealing with the daily onslaught, and the prospect feels totally daunting. I’ve been asking colleagues to tell me how they deal with email, and it’s been disheartening to learn that so many of them don’t. If there’s one consensus I’ve found, it’s that email don’t work anymore and it feels like there’s no escape.

The podcast Reply All ran an episode a while back about a guy, Mat Honan who stopped using email for personal communication. I was intrigued until I listened and learned that he admitted that even though he tells people not to email him, he still checks his account. And that’s the worst part of email. Even when we pretend not to care, we still do.

Images: Drowning in email sketch by Xavier Vergés via Flickr.