[Infowarrior] - Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami

[Richard Forno]

April 20, 2008
Digital Domain
Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami
By RANDALL STROSS

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/technology/20digi.html

E-MAIL has become the bane of some people¹s professional lives. Michael
Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering new Internet
companies, last month stared balefully at his inbox, with 2,433 unread
e-mail messages, not counting 721 messages awaiting his attention in
Facebook.

Mr. Arrington might be tempted to purge his inbox and start afresh ‹ the
phrase ³e-mail bankruptcy² has been with us since at least 2002. But he
declares e-mail bankruptcy regularly, to no avail. New messages swiftly
replace those that are deleted unread.

For most of us who are not prominent bloggers, our inbox, thankfully, will
never become quite so crowded, at least with nonspam messages. But it
doesn¹t take all that many to seem overwhelming ‹ for me, the sight of two
dozen messages awaiting individual responses makes me perspire.

Eventually, someone will come up with software that greatly eases the burden
of managing a high volume of e-mail. But in the meantime, we perhaps should
look to the past and see what tips we might draw from prolific letter
writers in the pre-electronic era who handled ridiculously large volumes of
correspondence without being crushed.

When Mr. Arrington wrote a post about the persistent problem of e-mail
overload and the opportunity for an entrepreneur to devise a solution,
almost 200 comments were posted within two days. Some start-up companies
were mentioned favorably, like ClearContext (sorts Outlook inbox messages by
imputed importance), Xobni (offers a full communications history within
Outlook for every sender, as well as very fast searching), Boxbe (restricts
incoming e-mail if the sender is not known), and RapidReader (displays
e-mail messages, a single word at a time, for accelerated reading speeds
that can reach up to 950 words a minute).

But none of these services really eliminates the problem of e-mail overload
because none helps us prepare replies. And a recurring theme in many
comments was that Mr. Arrington was blind to the simplest solution: a
secretary.

This was the solution Thomas Edison used in pre-electronic times to handle a
mismatch between 100,000-plus unsolicited letters and a single human
addressee. Not all correspondents would receive a reply ‹ a number were
filed in what Edison called his ³nut file.² But most did get a written
letter from Edison¹s office, prepared by men who were full-time secretaries.
They became skilled in creating the impression that Edison had taken a
personal interest in whatever topic had prompted the correspondent to write.

To Mr. Arrington, however, having assistants process his e-mail is anathema.
His blog, after all, is dedicated to covering some of the most technically
innovative companies in existence. ³I can¹t believe how many commenters
think the solution to the problem is human labor,² he wrote.

Another recipient of large volumes of e-mail messages, Mark Cuban, similarly
avoids reliance on human proxies. Mr. Cuban, the owner of the Dallas
Mavericks and various ventures, saw Mr. Arrington¹s post and wrote a short
note on his own blog: ³2,433 Unread E-mails. I Feel your Pain.² Mr. Cuban
said that he receives more than a thousand messages a day, which he still
processes himself, including the 10 percent that are of ³the ŒI want¹
variety.² (These were what Edison called ³begging letters.²)

That personal touch is sorely missed in the e-mail replies we receive from
large companies. Customer service automation subjects a message to semantic
analysis to extract its general meaning, then dispatches a canned answer at
the least possible cost. It aims to provide a ³close enough² reply; it does
not provide reassuring words conveyed by one human to another.

Mr. Cuban and Mr. Arrington likewise could resort to a technological
solution, preparing an auto-response for their public e-mail accounts that
would warn strangers that the volume of e-mail precluded even a skimming,
let alone dispatching responses. Yet both have resisted that course.

We all can learn from H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), the journalist and
essayist, who was another member of the Hundred Thousand Letters Club, yet
unlike Edison, corresponded without an amanuensis. His letters were
exceptional not only in quantity, but in quality: witty gems that the
recipients treasured.

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, the author of ³Mencken: The American Iconoclast²
(Oxford, 2005), shared with me (via e-mail) details of her subject¹s
letter-writing habits. In his correspondence, Mencken adhered to the most
basic of social principles: reciprocity. If someone wrote to him, he
believed writing back was, in his words, ³only decent politeness.² He
reasoned that if it were he who had initiated correspondence, he would
expect the same courtesy. ³If I write to a man on any proper business and he
fails to answer me at once, I set him down as a boor and an ass.²

Whether the post brought 10 or 80 letters, Mencken read and answered them
all the same day. He said, ³My mail is so large that if I let it accumulate
for even a few days, it would swamp me.²

YET at the same time that Mencken teaches us the importance of avoiding
overnight e-mail indebtedness, he also reminds us of the need to shield
ourselves from incessant distractions during the day when individual
messages arrive. The postal service used to pick up and deliver mail twice a
day, which was frequent enough to permit Mencken to arrange to meet a friend
on the same day that he extended the invitation. Yet it was not so frequent
as to interrupt his work.

Today¹s advice from time-management specialists, to keep our e-mail software
off, except for twice-a-day checks, replicates the cadence of twice-a-day
postal deliveries in Mencken¹s time.

Ms. Rodgers said that Mencken was acutely disturbed by interruptions that
broke his concentration. The sound of a ringing telephone was associated in
his mind, he once wrote, with ³wishing heartily that Alexander Graham Bell
had been run over by an ice wagon at the age of 4.²

Mencken¹s 100,000 letters serve as inspiration: we can handle more e-mail
than we think we can, but should do so by attending to it only infrequently,
at times of our own choosing.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of
business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross at nytimes.com.