“Email is an absolute nightmare in my life. I dread it in the morning, I dread it more right before I go to bed. It’s always in the back of my mind, lingering,” writes TechCrunch’s MG Siegler. Many of us, also drowning in e-mail every day, can relate to the subtle and incessant pressure created by a constant influx of messages.
Siegler’s solution? He’s quitting email, at least for a month.
“And I’m hardly alone,” he says. “The tweets I sent out on the topic…were met with near unanimous agreement…It seems that most everyone I know wants to quit email. They’re just afraid.”
So how’s a guy supposed to write about cutting-edge tech news without a barrage of PR folk hammering down his inbox door every day? Get to him a different way, he says. If it’s really that important, people will find a way.
On the other end of the spectrum sits Dan Tynan writing for ITworld who currently has (gulp) 34,235 messages in his e-mail inbox, 22,342 of them unread. His solution to e-mail hell? Read and deal with every single incoming message for one entire week. Did this work?
Sort of. Although the process of being more intentional about sifting through e-mail sounds hellish (and amusing) as he describes it, in the end, he had a much better feel for which people’s e-mails were the greatest suck on his time which ultimately helped him delete or unsubscribe from their messages going forward.
To read both entertaining perspectives on dealing with e-mail overload, visit ITworld and TechCrunch.
