Email Rehab
My husband G. Grod sent me a link from Boing Boing to Merlin Mann at 43 Folders on “The strange allure (and false hope) of email bankruptcy“. This was the first I’d heard of the term, though Mann posted previously about it, and it may date from as long ago as 1999, according to this WaPo article. The popular lit agent/blogger, Miss Snark, periodically referred to “hosing out her inbox” in a similar bid to start fresh. Mann has another suggestion for managing email that he calls the “email DMZ“.
The WaPo piece notes that many tech-savvy and email-inundated people are backing off from (or even out of) email in favor of the telephone. Since having baby Guppy 16 months ago, I’ve attempted the opposite, as I found phone calls more difficult than email.
As I noted recently, though, I’m buried in my inboxes, both at home and for the blog. They’ve swelled to a grand, cringe-inducing, and possibly paralyzing, total of 580. Mann captures my feelings on this, exactly:
Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can’t handle that one tiny thing. “What ‘pile’? It’s just a fucking pebble!”
To all the kind friends and family who have emailed me, I will again quote Mann, in reply to you.
I’m not prepared to declare bankruptcy just yet, but if you were kind enough to email me a pebble some time over the last few [YEARS], there’s a very good chance that I still haven’t found the time to do something appropriately nice with it. Which makes me feel awful. I sincerely apologize if your lovely pebble is still in my very large pile.
I’m currently on a sort of break, so I have the usual hope/delusion that I’ll be able to “catch up on everything” that this piece from the Onion skewered so wonderfully. Please be patient if (when?) I don’t get through all 580 pebbles in the next few weeks.