If there’s one thing about the Internet I absolutely detest, it’s e-mail. It represents all that was wrong with the late 20th and early 21st centuries, which seems to be hell-bent on making our lives insanely unlivable. Then again, those living in mid to late 19th century must have the same thing about pneumatic tubes and the telegraph system. Even if the operators of those quaint systems felt overwhelmed, there really wasn’t some steampunk equivalent of spam or excessive bombardment of ephemerally important messages. No doubt it would have been too expensive. Unfortunately for us, e-mail is relatively cheap, especially for the senders. Forwards, spams, automated bot mails, and the all-important work-related memos — never, ever noticed. Unfortunately, some important e-mails get lost in the mix.
Like many people, I have one of those high-powered freebie e-mail addresses affiliated with one search engine or another. With GMail, there’s infinite space for all my love notes and more. So much space that my inbox recently got cluttered with 8000 messages. Were most of them important, like love notes? Not really. It’s safe to say that 90% of the messages clogging up my inbox were automated messages I subscribed to, like job search sites or an airmiles program or some other thing that sells itself as what modern life needs. I checked these messages with the mindset that I’d read them later, but later never came. I also held on to various e-mails that held one password or another or other seemingly important account information. Again, I never check them. Ultimately, I felt overwhelmed and the casualties were e-mails that were important, whether they were from friends or work. After all, if it were important, they could call me on the phone, right?
Which brings me to the work-related e-mails. Having taught at two community college districts, I’ve had to deal with something similar to my “personal” e-mail. In this case for each district, every chancellor, president, dean, department chair and every program director has to e-mail everyone in the system. Since most of this stuff isn’t urgent, I gloss over the subject lines and move on. Who has time to read the equivalent of 50+ pages a day in e-mail. I more or less got to the point where I tuned out, and the casualty were my students, who frantically tried to get a hold of me. Of course, their messages were urgent. In the past, I gave students my personal e-mail, but stopped because it felt like an intrusion into my personal space. That and some scary monsters and super creeps.
Unlike all the search engine-related freebie e-mail systems, the schools seem to have a finite amount of space for their .edu e-mail addresses. On one hand, all these college brass were flooding my inbox with stuff that doesn’t directly affect me (which makes it easier to ignore truly urgent messages from them). Then, I would occasionally get messages that my inbox was too full. Of course, a web-based Outlook isn’t as user-friendly as GMail, especially on a Mac. Which makes deleting all those e-mails too much work.
Yesterday, I worked on deleting much of my e-mail, whether it was personal or work-related. I tried saving the important stuff and even discovered I missed a party invitation for last Saturday. However, I got to the point where I indiscriminately deleted the rest and it felt good.
Now that I’ve reduced my inbox and archived the rest, I now have to think of an e-mail policy. I’ve considered setting up a time where I check my e-mail once in a day, reply to those who need one, and delete whatever I’m not going to read. After that, even with an iPhone, I’m not going to read them. Or, at least I’m not obligated to. As for the school e-mail, I should also use that same block of time to do that and make it clear to my students that I only check my e-mail once a day during a certain time. Ignoring e-mails was an attempt to find a sane solution to something insane, but it didn’t work. The once a day thing is saner. Oh, if I find that I’m bombarded with 800+ messages in one day, they’re all going down the digital trash can, unread.
