I suppose that when I first logged on to an AOL account back in 1995 that something should have warned me about the obssessive and compulsive attachment that email would have on my life.
After over 10 years of clicking a button to watch a waterfall of text and assorted media, I guess you could say that there is an addition. It’s a daily deluge of porn (filtered now by intelligent agents), P.T. Barnham sex enahancers to volumes of shared jokes and in the middle of it all relevant personal relationships that make up friends, business and even bill collectors. Email is a communitive evolution of my life as a human and unlikely to go away in my lifetime.
Last Thursday, our mail server at Times-News crashed…hard. Now that has happened more often that I like, but this weekend was a record-breaking 3 days without mail and I feel like I’ve made it through the desert. We finally got our mail server back up and running and thousands of messages started trickling in some time after 4.00 pm today.
It was truly surreal too. It bothered me not having to check my email. It seemed I was missing out on a lot, but what hurt me the most was the anxiety thinking that there was a delay in my response to some important issues. The personal stuff could wait, but the work….what’s happening here?
I don’t want to have to be withouth email for very long. It still thrills me to find those rare moments when I can unplug, but those are few and far between.
It’s amusing to watch others in the blogsphere wrestle with this info overload issue to. My first ramblings on this were echoed by Tom Peters on his blog one day.
CNN reported that Email was worse than pot in relation to ones IQ
After the outage, it felt good to see my work flow back up to the top and took care to find the stuff that mattered. Things seem to be OK for the moment and I’m glad, but it was funny how my feeds reported a similar situation at reported at The Wall Street Journal
“So how’d we fare this time around? Well, we’re glad to report that the removal of cold, impersonal email from our workplace reminded us of the value of getting up and talking with each other, reforging lasting connections that will do far more for us than any fancy software system could ever do. Yeah right. And then we went out and planted a tree.
No, what really happened was a day of false starts, fluttering hands and embarrassed shrugs, vaguely agonizing and occasionally amusing. ”
The article went on to make several other valid points:
– Email is linked to our calendars
– Email is a storage place for documents
– Email involves a lot of people
– Some email tell us what our next move our by the most recent thread
– Email has replaced the telephone
– Email is used to send ourselves information
The article continues and says…
“Work still got done, though sometimes in fits and starts, but the day repeatedly felt wrong”