Erik Van Alstine

Erik Van Alstine

Author. Leadership strategist. Expert in Perceptual IntelligenceTM.

Email-Mageddon, Part 3

This is part 3. In my first and second post, I explained how the advent of email created an extremely oppressive social shift. Here’s what I wrote:

  • Personal written communication (PWC for short), meaning, communication in writing from friends and family and co-workers that requires a written response, used to be extremely expensive. We had to hand-write letters, affix a stamp, mail them, and wait a long time for a reply.
  • That made PWC extremely rare. In 1986, the average person sent and received only one piece of PWC, every other week. Sending and replying took up less than an hour a month.
  • Now that PWC is fast and easy, it’s up more than a hundred times. The average knowledge-worker spends more than three hours a day replying to PWC, close to a hundred hours a month, compared to one hour a month thirty years ago.
  • Even though demand has skyrocketed, there’s still the same social obligation to reply. Senders are offended when recipients fail to get back to them. Recipients are torn because they do not want to spend time replying to email but their sense of duty compels them. The queue for requests is sucking the life out of them.
  • This is a major social shift, and millions of people feel trapped in it, like factory workers whose production quota has gone up a hundred times, with serious consequences for failing to meet quota.
  • This is why I describe this social phenomenon as email-mageddon.

The last thirty years is witness to the hundred-fold rise of a “social attention tax,” and it’s time for a tea party revolt. We cannot demand this level of social commitment from others, and we should not expect it from ourselves. It is simply not acceptable to participate in this massive spike in social obligation.

How do we escape the email-mageddon? Here are some ways…

Change the culture of social obligation.

First, there has to be an education campaign that lets people off the hook in this area. Eventually we must get to the point where we do not expect replies to every email and text. We do not get offended when people fail to reply. We no longer view replies as a test of duty or a test of love or a test of how much the other person values us.

Cultural norms are hard to break, so we’ve got to stick with it. We should be commending the Millennials for opting out of PWC, not berating them. We should start showing how much of a social burden this has become, as I’ve tried to do by giving people a vivid look at the difference between today and circa 1986, when PWC hardly existed at all.

When we get a clear view of how socially repressive this has become, it will help us give grace to people and reset expectations.

The burden must switch back over to those asking for attention, to demonstrate why their request for attention must get to the top of the pile. Where as in years past attention was much easier and cheaper psychologically to deliver, today it is much more expensive. When we ask for peoples attention today we are asking for something that might be 100 times more valuable to them today then it was 30 years ago. It is our responsibility to demonstrate why we should earn the right to take that value. Before we write a request for attention to personal written communication, we should ask ourselves, How justifiable is my request given the 100x increase in demand on each and every human being in modern American life?

I suggest we cut down email communication by at least 10 to 20 times the normal pattern. We can do this by asking ourselves how valuable it is to communicate this given all the other priorities that each of us have to sort through. If a request for PWC is not high on the list don’t send it, or save the email for a better time, or perhaps consolidate all task requests into one email that could be sent once a week instead of several emails being sent every day. Senders must see every email they send like a brick being added to a recipients’ backpack. We don’t want to add weight unless it’s an obviously justifiable thing to do.

Put up barriers to low-priority PWC.

While we chip away the culture of social obligation, we can put up barriers that block the inflow of low-priority PWC. I’m not talking about spam filtering. We already have that. I’m talking about communication between co-workers and relatives and friends that clogs up the works. Here are a few suggestions.

  • First, we can set up a blanket email auto responder that reads, “My apologies, I’m unavailable to reply right now. If you’re like me, you’re overwhelmed with emails, and just can’t get back to all of them in time. I usually only reply to email between 1pm and 2pm daily. So if your message is urgent, please feel free to call me at 000.000.0000. Have a great day!”
  • Second, we can identify high priority contacts and set up an exception to the auto responder that reads, “I appreciate your email, and plan to prepare a response for you as soon as I am able.” Then we can set up special folders for our high-priority contacts, so that we see only their emails when we click into the folder. This will assure we are putting priority on the relationships that matter most to us, and not getting caught up in second priorities.
  • Third, we can put a disclaimer in the footer of every email we send that reads, “I’m working to solve the problem of email overload by only emailing people for issues I know are important to them, and by encouraging my friends to do the same. Let’s work together to ease the burden for everyone.”

Tim Ferris has some practical ideas here, I suggest looking at his idea list and adopting the ones that work for you.

Then there’s Dan Ariely’s approach and his app, which I highly recommend, and will be sharing in about a week.

I’m sure you have many good ideas about this as well, please feel free to share them with me!

With the right strategies and a bunch of time and effort, we can escape the apocalypse. We can be free from email-mageddon.

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