Email Bankruptcy: Fighting the Urge

It’s Sunday morning, I’m at the airport about get on a flight back to Toronto, and I’m frustrated by the amount of email sitting in my inbox. In the past 12 hours since I last checked my mail, I have received 278 new emails (and that’s low compared to some of the other days this week) and none of those are spam: they’re all messages I need to read, file, reply to, or put into action.

For those of you who know me well, you know I like keeping my inbox at zero messages. I label my email quickly and effectively and then reply or take action as required and when I have time. This is a good setup in general, and I usually clear out my various ‘reply’ and ‘action’ labels in good time. These days, however, I’m spending so much time filing and sorting emails that I have little-to-no time to actually respond or react to these emails. Needless to say, I’m swamped. Overwhelmed. Exhausted. And more and more, I want to declare email bankruptcy.

Everyone these days has written about email bankruptcy [Google, Technorati] and I’ve been scoffing at most of them. Once you have a system, keeping up with email should be a breeze, right? Wrong. I’m quickly feeling inundated these days, and I think Merlin Mann hit the nail on the head with his recent post about the false hope of email bankruptcy:

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 f**king pebble!”

Instead of declaring email bankruptcy, I’ve done some reflection and realized that the problem isn’t that I can’t handle large amounts of correspondence. Instead, I’ve realized that most of the people around me — coworkers, friends, associates, clients — are using email to do things that should otherwise be done through other kinds of communication channels.

1. Collaborative Documents
   Right now, as it stands, a significant chunk of the emails in my inbox say something like “comments on draft 9 of so-and-so document.” I’ve been telling people that collaborating on documentation is absolutely horrendous when attempted by email. Google Documents does this quite easily and effectively, and even better, why not just set up a wiki? They’re so easy to use, and reduce clutter and junk in my inbox.
2. Scheduling and Calendars
   Need to remind me about events, meetings, parties, something? Set up a Google Calendar. Better yet, let me grab an .ics file when you create the event so I can add it to iCal. That way you don’t have to email me four times to remind me about coffee tomorrow. Trying to schedule a good time for a get-together? You can use a wiki again, or services like MeetWithApproval.com. Coordinating a meeting with twenty people over email just doesn’t work.
3. Life Updates
   I love the fact that you’re having a blast on your vacation in Botswana or that your mission work in Thailand is proving to be exciting. I just don’t need to receive three emails (each with at least 10mbs of photos attached to them) a week about it all. Especially since you’re just writing one long update and sending it to all 124 people on your mailing list. If you’re writing a special message to me, I understand. If not, put your updates up on a blog and tell everyone to subscribe to the feed or at least bookmark the site. That way my mailbox doesn’t get inundated and my email address isn’t broadcasted to every other person you know.
4. Major Time-Sensitive Discussions
   I’ve never been a fan of random chit-chat on the phone, and to tell you the truth, I avoid phone conversations whenever possible. But if we need to discuss something important, the asynchronous exchange of ideas offered by email isn’t quite the best way of accomplishing results. Pick up the phone (or Skype, whatever) and let’s talk about it.
5. Press-Releases
   I get inundated with press-releases and offers from PR companies, and because so many of them end up being clutter in my inbox, I tend to delete most of them without looking them over. This is bad for the PR company because their message isn’t being delivered, but also bad for me because I miss out on a lot of otherwise free offers. Solution: set up an RSS feed for all the releases you’d normally send to me by email. That way, important headlines will jump out at me, and you don’t have to keep sending all those silly emails to everyone on your mailing lists.

So I’ve decided not to declare email bankruptcy. Instead, I’m going to hope that people read this and contact me in ways that are more manageable, and I’m going to apologize to those of you who are still awaiting a reply from me. I’m still working on moving my pile, one pebble at a time.