Emails are a glorious thing, but at the same time they are a life sucking alien that just wants to feed off your soul to spawn its own mutant off springs. Remember the old days when checking your email was an ordeal? You had to wait for the modem to connect, and then you had to log into the site and so forth. It was an event much like waiting for the mail man. Mail person? I'm gender neutral here.
The instant gratification of emails is its best and worst part. I know you get my emails the second I send it. You are just like me and are sitting at your terminal waiting for little bits of information only to ignore them. There is no etiquette to email, well, sort of. . . Everyone is expect to respond immediately, but why? Why can't I take a few days. It would serve both of us to have some time to think.
I would like to subscribe to a service that collects all my emails and will deliver all of them at, say, 5 o'clock. It could even be around 5, running into delays like a real post person. I'm just saying it would be nice to have a set time to receive things instead of having the constant worry that things could come in at any moment. It is an affection that will become habit if I don't stop check my email constantly.
@topherjaynes
1 Comments:
This exact subject was/has been the subject of a good deal of discussion over the years in regards to how much of a distraction and productivity killer email can be. There are lots of schools of thought regarding how to deal with the constant input that is email and one of the ones I liked the most was cutting back on the frequency with which email gets checked, much as you suggest. It was mainly designed for people who use tools like Thunderbird or Outlook and the idea was to dial back the frequency with which the program checked email (from once a nano-second to something relaxed like once an hour) to give yourself some time to focus on other tasks. Of course, with everything going into the cloud with services like Gmail, this seems a less useful trick but still something to think about.
Mind you, I can't help but wonder what is the next step is if reducing email delivery to once a day like snail mail delivery catches on: Vacuum tubes in our iPods? Tweets delivered by pneumatic tubes? Rotary dial cell phones?
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