E-mail Bankruptcy
Wow, you take a vacation, commit to leaving technology tuned off, and when you walk back in your office after a 12-day break…you have over 300 e-mails to deal with (and that was after deleting the spam ones). Can you say “exhausting”?
There is a term coined by Lawrence Lessig in 2004 called E-mail Bankruptcy. Apparently he decided to close an e-mail account after an overwhelming receipt of garbage messages compared to legitimate ones – and used the term to validate his actions. I can relate. In addition to all the junk and SPAM e-mail I receive (over 10,000 in that 12-day span) however, I do in fact receive way too many e-mails that are indeed legitimate. Our corporate culture has tilted heavily towards defaulting to reliance on e-mail when often a phone call would be more appreciated and probably resolve the issue faster, more effectively, and more personally.
Today, when faced with the daunting task of sifting through, processing, and dealing with hundreds of e-mails I wanted to declare e-mail bankruptcy. I really wanted to “select all” in my in box and just hit delete. It is kind of like the function in Google Reader when you can “mark all as read”…and have your do over or the chance of starting with a fresh, clean slate. One has to figure, that if the requests were really important, people would send a follow up e-mail. In fact, it was amazing to discover that many of the supposed needs, requests, and FYI’s had already been solved in my absence. I really feel I wasted today reading endless, mostly useless e-mail. So, I think the e-mail bankruptcy term should be refined to include the deletion of “while you were on vacation” e-mails.
Since I am not sure what the solution is, I think every employee should be allowed one e-mail bankruptcy declaration per year. Just select all and hit delete. Maybe then the positive rest effects of the vacation would not be worn off during the first day back at work!
What do you think?
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