Living without a Net, Part ???: What I will and won't do to get through my email

Another addition in my series on the daily existence of an Entrepreneur...

As a struggling freelancer with nothing else to do but pitch--and occasionally, write--articles, I used to live and die by my email. It was 1998: Email was fairly new at the time as a means of mass business communication. Without the benefit of a corporate tech support team, a $14.95 per-month AOL dial-up connection was all that I could set-up myself.

Since leaving the company where I worked it became my morning ritual to power up my Gateway computer, activate AOL, spend 10 frustrating minutes trying to establish a connection, and then wait patiently for the male voice who yelled, "You've Got Mail!" In effect, this voice told me, "You Are Wanted."

Back then, a good morning brought me ten messages in the following breakdown: three from family; three from friends, three from people I'd pitched to or from editors I was already working with, and one solicitation. There was so little SPAM at the time, relatively speaking, that I still couldn't identify it and read those suckers. A bad day was firing up AOL and then hearing no voice at all. The silence, in effect, told me "You Are Not Wanted."

I took it quite personally when my painstakingly constructed emails were not returned, notably by editors and people I wanted something from. I wondered what made them think they were better than other people that they couldn't at least reply. I'll never forget the Wall St. Journal editor who called me one night, a few days after I'd pitched her, and replied to my query. It wasn't right for her, she said, but she knew what it was like to be a young writer and wanted to provide more than an impersonal "No." That woman goes on my personal list of people destined for sainthood. I knew even then how hard it was to get replies, let alone personal ones. Still, I wondered why more people couldn't be like her. And I vowed that, should I ever have many people trying to reach me--for anything--that I would take great pains to respond to each just as thoroughly as this editor did.

In future years and at future jobs my email software became more sophisticated. I started receiving much more SPAM and could recognize it much more easily. I established several accounts to cut down on the possibility of email filtering into my business mail. Though I kept business and personal email separate, there was always enough time to read all of it at the end of the day. And, even if there was no way in hell that I would publish or do business with someone, I always responded to unsolicited queries with a personal note, explaining why. 

Today, in my home office I have a much different relationship with email and I struggle to have the same idealism I used to have about correspondence. I've had to learn to get over this idealism because adhering to it could very well affect my sanity.

I'm not different than any busy person in the Age of Information. Because it's not always feasible spending hours on the phone with my colleagues, I use email as a means of everyday communication. I'm able to reach out to the many, many companies that BlogHer works with in some capacity, and hundreds of bloggers in the BlogHer community. I get solicitations from companies interested in working with BlogHer, or from companies that are approaching me as a blogger. I get scores of trade newsletters--some I subscribed to and some that I didn't, and some that I no longer want, but I know the person sending it personally and don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I get notifications when someone comments on my blog. I get digest dispatches from the Yahoo! Groups I belong to. I get notifications of new statements from my credit card company. I get updated pictures of my niece and nephew. I get the occasional note from an old college or high school friend who came upon my name on Google and wanted to say hi. I get the occasional dispatch from B-friend at work. I get Evites from my friends about get-togethers. I get confirmations from orders that I placed. I get new contact info from friends or former colleagues. I get research data that I store for future reference. I get password confirmation notices. I get recommended links from friends and business associates. On occasion I get really nice notes from people who just wanted to make me feel good. And, more than anything else, I get SPAM.

I complained to someone once about how every morning, when I fired up my Outlook, I got reams and reams of SPAM. It doesn't bother me tremendously; it usually comes in bunches that I can massively strike. The only snafus occur when someone legit has sent me an email from someplace in a different time zone, it arrives with the rest of the crap I receive overnight, and I accidentally nuke it. There's something gratifying about seeing 60 new email messages flood into your account, and being able to delete 20 of them immediately. Perhaps I'm co-dependent in that regard; I've stopped looking at SPAM as the problem and begun to look at the bright side of including it in my life. I know that if I don't receive it, something is most certainly wrong with my computer or internet connection. It's the equivalent of a breathing machine; it provides a din of normalcy that I'm used to.

I don't like to talk about the SPAM that I get, especially with people who work in technology, who typically own their own servers and invest in tools that shoot and kill all questionable dispatches.

They say to me, "Thirty percent of your email is SPAM!?!?! Good God, what are you using?"

I say, "Norton, a Spyware filter, then there's Yahoo Spam Filter--I think that gets a ton of it before it reaches me."

The ensuing eyerolling at my naivete is too painful at this point. I'm never doing enough to curb the SPAM, and it usually results in someone running an analysis of the time I'm wasting even glancing at subject lines in my email client. I insist that I have most of the egregious SPAM titles memorized and can spot them almost instantly. I can also recognize SPAMer names just as quickly. (I have friends with unique names, but names like "Clyde Xavier" set off an internal email BS detector.) I have to keep these conversations about my SPAM tolerance to a minimum; they can get rather impassioned rather quickly.

Clearly my--and the world's--relationship with email has changed since 1998. Back then I didn't spend hours trying to knock out 30 or 40 messages before bed. And, running my own business, not many of the post-SPAM-sweep dispatches that I receive are the kind that require a simple "Yes/No" answer, or a hand-off to my business partners. While a few do--and I've gotten over my previous hangup of just replying "Yes" or "No--many require additional brain cells. Some I keep in my Unread file, where I put messages that may be easier to answer the next morning after cathartic slumber.

Then there are messages that you could reply to right away, but you would be talking out of your butt if you did; you need to inconveniently track down other people and confirm information before you can reply confidently. Unfortunately, if the reply is very complex, you are in jeaopardy of forgetting the original question behind the message. And then, days later, when you are discussing the issue on the phone, someone will inevitably say, "Did you get back to me on that?", forcing you to mentally pull up the entire thread of email and try to identify at what point the chain of correspondence was broken. In these situations, I highly recommend avoiding email completely and securing needed information by phone.

Then there are the quick and dirty, but annoying, requests for stuff you've already sent out half a dozen times. I can't get too annoyed with these requests, since nine times out of ten, I'm the one making the request , and five times out of ten, when the request is being made of me, it's because I've forgotten to attach the file that I took twenty minutes to artfully describe. Another error-prone situation is the multi-program request, when someone requests a file that must be adjusted in another program before it can be sent properly--or someone has sent you a file without adjusting it properly--and somewhere in the back and forth the file gets forgotten. A situation I've found myself in:

"Did you ever get me that PDF?"

"No, So-and-So needed to fix the Illustrator file, which had a typo, before resending. Unfortunately I don't have the original Illustrator file, so I can't do it myself."

Days later...

"I sent you that PDF, right?"

"Not unless So-and-So was able to fix the illustrator file, PDF it, and get it to you. Did she?"

"Crap. I forgot about that."

You contact So-and-So for the file, she sends it, and you see that she has taken it upon herself to change the illustrator file, convert it into a JPEG, and make an adjustment to the graphic in PhotoShop that isn't acceptable. When she sends it, you see the problem, and you see that the file is too big and should be optimized and made a GIF. You'd do it, but you need the PhotoShop file. Back to the drawing board.    

Then there's the heartfelt "had to let you know" message that arrives nestled between two messages in all caps that read: "URGENT: Need you to call me now." By the time you've dealt with the urgent messages and have endured a stress level similar to someone working at NASA Ground Control during the Apollo landing, you forget to reply expediently to the heartfelt message. The inappropriately late response, "Thanks Sweetie. I love you too," days later, doesn't have quite the same effect as it would have if you'd responded more quickly.

Praise notes and blog comments are always hard for me; they are not necessarily urgent, but I tend to want to read them first. My eyeballs gravitate toward them; I can only hold off by cutting deals with myself that if I read through four Action-Oriented emails, and swallow them with a trade newsletter, I will get to have my nice-note dessert.

I've had to become increasingly draconian with my reading habits. In addition to SPAM, I've resorted to deleting the following from my Inbox:

• Anything with a subject line reading: "FWD: You'll love this."
• Anything with a subject line that reads: "Introducing (Insert new product here)"
• Anything from the Red Cross, or other charities that I've contributed to (and I feel badly when I do it)
• Obnoxious requests by people who don't know me, don't spell check or edit, and that are written like afterthoughts and not well-articulated

I've had to change my habit of reading everything that I subscribe to. Now I file it and do a keyword search to find content I need for research. If its a daily dispatch and I haven't read it in days, I'll chuck it.

Some personal emails I read, chuckle about, and then don't reply to, because I know that the spirit of the message was to simply let me know something, with no expectation of a reply. I've had to let go of a few previous imperatives:

• I must reciprocate every email written to me personally
• If I don't reply to every email, people will dislike me
• I am superhuman
• I have all the time in the world

Out of reverence for the kind editor from The Wall Street Journal, who called me during a most vulnerable time, I do make an effort to call, on occasion, someone who connects with me and with the utmost sincerity asks for my help. It seems the least I can do to pay the email kindness forward, particularly in a time--and a medium--when kindness isn't always a virtue.

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Comments

[miffy]

No response needed, EVER!
Just a smile, or chuckly, if it comes to the face!
A great read, once again Jory!
THANKS

[miffy]

Shit, CHUCKLE!!! not chuckly, I forgot to spellcheck!

[lizriz]

You are always preaching to my choir! :)

[Debbie Call]

Ah Jory . . .the good old days when email was manageable in the late 1990's. I now get 3800-4000 spam emails a week. I'm in the process of phasing out my domain email address within the next few days. It's taken me an enormous amount of time just to notify everyone of the change, including all the online sites I use to pay bills (and I'm not done yet). But, oh, how sweet it will be in the mornings when I check my email and will not have to be assaulted by all that disgusting spam. Hopefully it will be awhile before my undercover email identify is discovered by the spam trollers.

[Troy Worman]

I've found that the fewer emails I write the fewer I receive. Obviously, my situation is a little different that yours. Most notably, there is a clear line of demarcation between my work and personal email usage. Occassionally, I get personal email at work, but for the most part, work is work.

As an IT Director (of process improvement) for a Fortune 500 company with more than 38,000 employees, I spend a lot more time responding to pitches, complaints, and calls for help or opinion or engagement than solicitation.

Still, effective email management is a cornerstone of my personal organization strategy. As such, I have developed the following rules.

1. Email is not urgent. If you want my attention or if you want a response from me today, call me. If you leave me a voicemail, I will return your call the same day. If you send me an email, I will reply when I have time.

2. Carbons are not a priority. If you want to c.c. me on an email to another because you think it will facilitate resolution of your issue, feel free, but don't expect me to read it. If you want to c.c. me on an email because you think I might be interested, thank you, but I won't read it. If you want to c.c. me on an email because you want my opinion or engagement or any other action, don't, because I won't read it. I don't read carbons. I archive them offline for CYA, but I don't read them. (Currently, I have 2750 unread carbons archived)

3. I am typically involved in 8-to-12 projects at a time as well as a number of committees, etc., like Architectural Review, Project Review, Associate Development, Diversity Council, etc.; consequently, I am on a lot of distribution lists. These messages are important to me, but messages with my name only on the "To Line" recieve top priority. Messages that include others on the To Line are Priority 2.

4. If you are upstream in my chain of command or a member of my "VIP" list, rules 1-3 above do not apply. Messages from these individuals are routed to a Priory 1 folder.

My rules for handling my personal email are much simpler that those described above. There are only two.

1. Email is not urgent. (See above)

2. FIFO (First-in-first-out). I read my personal email in the order that I receive it.

Email is a good tool if used properly, but as we all know, IM and text messaging are becoming more and more popular. In fact, there are those that assert "email is for old people."

You can read more about this at ON!

[paul merrill]

Life is email. Working life, that is.

[kate]

. . . can't remember how I found you as I've been link surfing for a while now . . . just wanted to say how fabulous this post is, how I laughed, and how it lifted about a hundred pounds of email non-reply guilt :) So thanks. And, yeah, no reply needed :)