If your email inbox is overflowing, you don't have to spend the next three hours responding, you can tell everyone you know that you're filing for email bankruptcy. According to today's Washington Post, that means either you'll just ask people to resend their emails if they expect a response (weak form) or you'll sign off from email altogether (strong form).
I first got exposed to email at MIT back in 1980 when it was used on a few university and military computers. I could not see declaring email bankruptcy, although I don't get that much email. However, I do have other email problems: too much spam and an unreliable Yahoo! email account.
But some people have so much email that they declare weak form email bankruptcy. For example, In April, venture capitalist Fred Wilson announced he was giving up on responding to all the email piled up in his inbox. "I am so far behind on email that I am declaring bankruptcy," he wrote. "If you've sent me an email (and you aren't my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again. I am starting over."
MIT Professor Sherry Turkle came up with the concept of email bankruptcy after researching email and discovering that some people harbor fantasies about escaping their email burden. Turkle estimated that she has 2,500 pieces of unread email in her inbox and she jokes that a book she has been working on for a decade would have taken her half the time to write "if I didn't have email."
Rather than filing for the weak form, Stanford computer science professor Donald E. Knuth filed for strong form email bankruptcy. He started using email in 1975 and stopped 15 years later on January 1, 1990. Knuth, who prefers to concentrate on writing books rather than be distracted by steady communications, said "I'd get to work and start answering email -- three hours later, I'd say, "Oh, what was I supposed to do today." I have been a happy man since [1990]."
How many unread emails do you have? How do you deal with them? Would you file for email bankruptcy?
Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-26-2007 @ 8:09PM
Jim said...
I have three e-mail accounts that I use for professional (work), personal, and online business purposes. I usually begin the day logging onto my work account, and find my planned work day does not usually get started until an hour or more later. Even then, often some "urgent" e-mail request causes me to be sidetracked from my agenda for the day and not get accomp0lished what I'd planned. I have been using e-mail since the early 1980's, and it has grown to gobble up a big chunk of my work and personal hours. I can see how one might wish to just get away from it.