Skip to main content

Email

On any given day, I receive about 150-200 emails that require my attention. As of 11am this morning, I have already received around 70 such emails from my work account alone, and the deluge has not yet begun.

When I open my Gmail account in the morning, there are usually a good 20-25 emails that sit in this box as well, most of them informational and promotional but some of them reminders of things to do or friends to chat with. That pile just contributes to the list.

Over the course of any given day, I try to process as many of these emails as I can. Perhaps anachronistically, I clear as many as I can from whatever day seems fitting, not so much that I have some priority set to them, but because it catches my attention to get done at the moment.

Of course, this means that I don't quite process all the requisite emails on any given day, but let's leave that dog lying for now.

The kids today, they don't use email - they use something else. It's called text messaging and social networking. When one asks to "Facebook" them, it is clear where yesterday's email is now going.

Alas, this is a sign of the times. As much as I would like to try an email-quitting experiment like the writer at Techcrunch is doing, I believe that I am stuck with this deluge. And as a side note, it is a deluge that keeps me writing more fun things like a blog post than an unending number of less-than-five-line responses that are curt and focused meant to end an email thread.

With that, I am back to the inbox for my daily Sisyphean task.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...