Over the past few years, I have come to a growing and inescapable conclusion: I now hate email.
Given the fact that, among my close family and friends, I am still probably the most wired-in person they know, it may sound as if I’ve gone off some deep end. Maybe you’re thinking this makes me a cultural luddite.
3) It can be so easily misunderstood in ways that face-to-face communication almost never is.
For months now, I believed I was alone in this growing distaste. But then, several weeks back, I stumbled on blogger and time management guru Tim Ferriss, author of the book “The Four Hour Workweek.” Tim hates email so much that he’s all but eliminated it from his life.
And he’s the most “wired” guy that most of his friends know. Inspired by him, I quickly used some of what I’ll write below in a sermon.
Then, yesterday, that hip and happenin’ cultural barometer known as the Dallas Morning News (turn on your sarcasm detectors) posted a story, titled “Overloaded in boxes lead to email backlash.” And I suddenly knew that email-hate was a true current phenomenon in our cultural zeitgeist.
— You are not alone.
— There are things you can do about it.
“It happened with cigarettes. It happened with red meat. And carbs. And SUVs.
And now it’s happening with e-mail. It’s lost its cool factor.
“As legions of “knowledge workers” vacation this summer, the question of whether to take along the BlackBerry is more complicated than ever.
Do, and the vacation might not be such a vacation after all. Don’t, and you’re likely to return to an in-box that takes hours to clear or, worse, the dreaded “your mailbox has exceeded its limits” message.
I know this is how I feel.
I’ve long prided myself in the fact that I can get email at the church, at home, and on my Treo. In fact, I first bought a Treo because it was the first device I knew that allowed me to download email straight to it. I’m talkin’ the early Treos, when they were still called a “Visors,” and when they actually had an outside manufacturer that came up with a tiny plug-in modem. It wasn’t wireless at all. But it was email on my mobile device. And I thought I was too cool for school.
Now, everybody has that and millions think it cool. And right at the time they’re coming to this conclusion, I’m rethinking the whole idea altogether.
Part of it, as I said above, is because of how much email there is. I get a lot of email. To manage it, I’ve pushed it to several email addresses. There’s a personal address I use, for family, friends, and music. There’s a “music list” address, for various email lists associated with music. There’s a church address. There’s a “church list” address for my Lectionary Group, and others. There’s a “contact” address for the various websites I manage. (Luckily a catch-all for all of them…) And there’s even the address Southwestern Bell gave us years ago when we signed up, that we hardly ever use.
Counting all these email boxes, and not counting spam, I probably get between 250-300 email messages a day.
Been there. Done that. Could write the manual.
At a certain point that doesn’t help either, just because of sheer volume. I’m subscribed to several email lists that, frankly, I hardly check anymore. There’s just no time. Sadly, I have real email friends out there that I hardly correspond with anymore.
But my hate for email also also has to do with how people use it, and how people expect you to respond. Increasingly, I have found that folks use email to write loooong, I mean seriously long, “War and Peace” length correspondence.
In fact, studies have shown that more than 60 percent of all people assume that they will get a response to any email they send –of any length, and any complexity– within 24-hours.
But frankly, sometime the needed response is too complex to dash off in two minutes or less. The writer has spent hours composing their thoughts, and then expects you to magically respond within five minutes.
And there’s one more thing –and this is where I get dangerously close to psychoanalyzing above my “paygrade”– I also think that email rewards those who are somewhat “obsessive/compulsive.” They can dash out these long, copious emails, without breaking a sweat. If it’s a group setting, they can respond before anyone else, and they often expect you to as well.
Which has led me to conclude that email rewards a certain “obsessive/compulsive” personality. And that certainly can’t be good for the rest of us.
Which leads to the final reason for why I hate email: It can be so easily misunderstood.
How many times have you written a friend or family member, and had your words taken out of context? How many times have you emailed a group and had your best joke totally missed?
It happens all the time. That’s because words on page are always subject to the interpretation, and creative imagination, of the reader. Whether we’re reading a novel or a note from our email group on “Creative Basketweaving,” we use far more of our imagination to interpret a writer’s intent than we do for, say, face-to-face communication or a even phone conversation. And our own interpretation and imaginative assumptions are interesting, but often not at all what the writer had in mind. (Fine, if you’re reading a novel. Not so hot, if you’re reading a coworkers email).
Even a phone conversation, while not real “face-to-face,” contains ways to interpret the sender’s meaning…their inflection…their tone….the anger, joy, or boredom in their voice.
None of that is readily available via email. And that’s why email is so often misinterpreted. That’s why you end up spending even more time explaining yourself, responding to those who have misunderstood you, then you would have if you’d just picked up the phone in the first place.
59% of people with portable email devices admit that they check their email the moment that a new message comes in.
One in four take their email device to bed with them each night.
53% of people admit to checking email in the bathroom!
But does all this email obsession get us anywhere?
One of the simplest and most elegant solutions is to just check email twice a day: once in the morning, and once in the late afternoon.
Why not? Tim says. Look, you’re not the President of the United States. You’ve never yet gotten an email where the fate of the Western world hangs on your response. Let’s be realistic here. Ask yourself: if your senders don’t get a response from you until much later in the day, what’s will really go wrong?
One of his ideas is to go without email for one day a week. Actually, several major companies have instituted this already….US Cellular….Intel…and others.
We might want to pause and think about that one, huh?
One other idea –which I read on Tim’s blog but cannot get my fingers on right now– is a rule one company instituted for email exchanges. If employees “A” and “B” are talking about work, and if the “back and forth” between them goes on for two full rounds (two sends, and two receives), then they are required to stop using email, pick up the phone, and (gasp!) talk to each other.
I LOVE this one. One of my own biggest frustrations about email is that it makes simple conversations that used to take seconds via phone last for hours and days.
Well, hope you find something to like in this post.
If you’ve been finding your own growing hate of email growing, know that you are not alone. If you’ve got your own solutions, feel free to share them. And if you’d like to chat about it, that’s fine.
But, please, just leave me a comment.
Don’t send me an email.