A treatise on email
1
OPTIMIZING FOR CREATIVITY
I’m a leeeettle bit obsessed with the writings of Oliver Burkeman right now. I just finished reading his latest, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (I mean, that title alone—gold), and started on The Antidote: Happiness for People who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.
I’m not a big non-fiction reader (so much love for all y’all who find reality fascinating; however, usually you’ll find me plowing through yet another escapist fantasy to help me feel sane in this wild world of ours), so when a book about real life grabs me, I pay attention.
Reading this post of his kicked off my interest. He explores the common pattern that emerges from studying the work habits of successful, productive people throughout history: they only put in three to four hours of deep work a day.
My primary challenge at work is protecting chunks of time in which I can do my actual job. The rest of the time, I’m juggling meetings, my inbox, chats, and snacks—context switching to the max. When I manage to successfully block off uninterrupted thinking-and-creating time, it’s magic; I make progress faster, I write better, I’m more engaged.
2
LATE TO THE PARTY
There’s a part of me (the introverted writer-reader part, so, you know, ~ 95% of me) that loves email. I’ve participated in several epic email threads in my personal inbox over the years, and they bring me joy. 1. They’re portals into my brain at exact moments in time—to reread them is to time travel. 2. Writing my thoughts out forces me to detangle and reassemble the enmeshed jumble therein and find coherence amidst the muddle. And 3. I get glimpses into the minds of people I love, which is a gift bestowed on me by them.
Knowing that, you may be surprised to hear that I’m starting to feel like I’m “over” email. I know all the cool kids have been “over” email for years, but I am no cool kid. I’m a letter-writing, phone-call-loving, luddite-ish nerd. What I’m getting at is, I wasn’t even trying to go to this anti-email party the cool kids have been throwing. I showed up by accident. But I’m here to party.
I’m simply tired. Of email. Of articles advising I achieve the mythical inbox zero (no, that’s not going to happen, but thank you for piling shame on top of my inbox count). Of the marketing emails. Of the spam folder. Of the weird emails that sneak past my spam folder. Of the tomes. Everyone’s writing tomes. Please, school, don’t send me a tome. Please, non-profit I donated to several years ago, don’t send me a tome. I only want tomes from friends. That’s it. Keep your tomes to yourselves, companies. My inbox is full. And my brain is too. (Those previous two statements are related.)
Why are we experiencing email fatigue, even we uncool kids who didn’t show up at the anti-email party years ago?
Email asks something of us. It wants our attention. Just a sliver here and there. But that attention, each little bit we give, costs us. Perhaps the costliest: it interrupts you. Say you’re thinking about looking up a recipe for dinner, so you open your device to see what the NYTimes Cooking app is recommending today. But when you turned off your screen last, you left your email open. And now, your eyes send a quick note to your brain that both Travelzoo and Kiva want your attention. So you open up those emails with the intention of deleting them, and now you’re lost skimming and deleting, pondering what trip you want to take next, which microloan to give, and pretty soon 15 minutes have passed, and you don’t remember why you’re here, so you shut off your screen, and then your tummy rumbles, and then you remember you were going to look for a recipe, so you unlock your device, and now you have two new emails demanding your attention, and the cycle repeats itself. (Does this happen to you regularly, Meghan, you may be wondering? Yes. Obviously. This story is too specific to be fiction.)
Plus, email literally stresses people out. Their heart rates spike when a new email pops into their inbox because now there’s something new on their to-do list. It’s a wee little thing, but it’s there, interrupting, taking up your attention, taxing your body. And as humans, we are literally designed to connect with other people, so we feel anguish and anxiety when we don’t connect, or, in the case of email, when we don’t respond. Email accidentally exploits our social nature because it yields more activity than we could ever properly respond to, sending us into distress.
Do you have an answer? In my personal inbox, I’ve unsubscribed till the cows came home, and it’s still a mess in there. At work, there’s nothing I can do about it—email is life. And it’s really handy sometimes. I love it. I despise it. I check it all the time. I refresh, wondering if someone wants me, if someone is thinking of me. I close it in an effort to focus, then miss time-sensitive messages when I emerge, blinking, from my writing reverie. I don’t know how to win. Do you?
3
DESTRESSING ONLINE, PARADOX
The popular meditation app Headspace was integrated into my Microsoft Teams software, so now I can destress at work while I’m on my computer.
Wait, are you telling me that I should relax on my computer? Isn’t my computer (not to mention my mini pocket computer/iPhone) a primary reason I’m stressed in the first place?
Wellness is considered so crucial for people that many companies, including the one I work for, subsidize or provide wellness apps for free to their employees. When I signed up for 90 days of complimentary access to the full Headspace app, I felt the stirrings of future relief. (I feel compelled to tell you that my 90 days expired without me making it through a single full meditation because while I’m good at keeping other people’s secrets, I spill my own proactively.)
Headspace may not have done it for me, but my company provided another perk: A year ago, I started taking voice lessons, and they’re covered by my company’s wellness program. I’m not a great singer; I’m solidly mediocre, in fact. But I love it. I do it for the joy of learning, for the knowledge I’ve gained about my body (turns out I’d been breathing wrong for years), for the fun of pushing myself to do something that doesn’t come naturally and that I’ll never be particularly good at. My lessons are conducted over Zoom, and while in-person meetings would probably give me even more warm fuzzies, I’m at peace with this form of de-stressing online.
The companies we work for have a vested interest in keeping us healthy; our relationship is symbiotic, and the exchange relies on each party thriving, so I don’t begrudge them their wellness programs (and obviously I’m benefiting from them myself). But what if we lived in societies constructed so that we didn’t need so many employer-provided wellness programs just to get through the day intact? What if the strength of our community meant we didn’t have to shoulder our burdens at home alone? What if we could work fewer hours and still get paid enough to survive and thrive and from there had time to connect deeply with our friends and family, go outdoors while the sun’s still shining each day, pursue whimsies that nourish us for no other reason than that this world, these lives of ours, can be a beautiful thing?
As usual, I don’t have answers (I study grammar and writing and design systems and the flow of information on webpages, and I am less knowledgeable about reforming the intricacies of societal governance, so I have little confidence in my ability to draft a plan to overhaul our social system), but I have hope that encountering the concept of wellness in our periphery is having the net-positive effect of driving our collective consciousness toward embracing actual wellness, virtual or otherwise.
4
AVOID CONTEXT SWITCHING
Humans are not computers. Despite our brains being literal neural networks, we can’t run countless processes simultaneously, nor switch from one to another to the next without penalty.
I felt (more) scattered (than normal) last year (and the year prior; hello, pandemic), so lately I’ve attempted to slow down, read fewer articles, open fewer (unnecessary) emails, scroll less, and resist the instinct to cram in as many experiences and as much information as possible every day.
Focusing on a single thing is more relaxing than attempting to split my attention, horcrux style, in seven directions at once, and this article about avoiding context switching took me down this streamlined path in the first place.
5
SIFT OUT THE FAKE STUFF
If the internet’s good at one thing, it’s disseminating false information and personal opinions. To function as a society, we humans instinctively trust most people (unless we’re picking up on physiological clues that the other person is trying to hide something from us, but I digress).
Not everyone has learned how to sift truth from lies, and it’s especially hard online when people we trust post things of dubious origin. Luckily there’s a method for uncovering the truth, the SIFT method:
S—Stop
I—investigate the source
F—Find better coverage
T—Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context
When you find your way back to the source of any “fact,” you’ll be better equipped to determine its authenticity, and that’s a skill we all need to hone.