PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

In the late 1990s I worked for a large government agency as part of a job that employed over 1200 contractors (Welcome to government work.) Each day I'd get incredible amounts of email -- most of which was completely useless to me.

Before I left, I asked if I could form a small team and take part in a 2-3 month project. They had initially planned on a team of 20, but I felt that small teams, left alone and working in small timeboxes, could perform just as well.

Of course, we performed much better than the larger team, but the reason I tell the story is this: for purposes of my own experiment, I stopped reading emails.

The customer loved what we were doing, and expanded the project some. I think it lasted 5 or 6 months total. During that entire time I never turned on my email program.

I finally left the job. God knows how many thousands of emails built up in my inbox. But it was never a problem.

It was also one of the nicer experiences I've had in technology. The team just called each other or walked to each other's cube and chatted when we needed to talk, and the day was nicely free of useless distractions.

Why? I think the problem with email (and IM and FB now) is that everything has the same interruption power. The email from HR with the monthly newsletter has the same ability to disrupt your day as the email from your accountant telling you some terribly important financial news. All of it involves you switching contexts, scanning the subject line, and then deciding to deep-dive on the material or not. Hell, by the time you've switched context, you might as well read the article: your concentration is shot. Ten seconds of scanning an email header might take five or ten minutes to recover from. It's not a good trade-off. Of course, there's also the fact that people email/IM/FB others simply because they can, whether they have anything of import to say or not. You'd think twice if you had to walk over to somebody's cube to show them a picture of a cat, but you wouldn't blink an eye to post an article with the same content to 100 people on FB.

I only check my priority inbox now too, but I feel that I need a priority inbox for it.

> It's like important CEOs having a secretary.

I've never understood why busy people don't use staff to "pre-clean" the inbox. Especially if you get dozens of emails a day. After a vacation (heck, every day), I spend a lot of time deleting spam, daily reports, and threads I'm cc'd in (but get resolved by others).

> Of course, there's also the fact that people email/IM/FB others simply because they can, whether they have anything of import to say or not. You'd think twice if you had to walk over to somebody's cube to show them a picture of a cat, but you wouldn't blink an eye to post an article with the same content to 100 people on FB.

Daniel, thanks for talking about this, because it's made me realize how different people's perspectives are when it comes to this technology. I started using IM in seventh grade, and for me it's always been a tool for social distraction. Recently I've started using it for business and for thesis interviews, but I still don't turn it on unless I'm expecting small talk with friends. Ditto Facebook, which was created my sophomore year in high school and the point of which was to give other people opportunities to small talk with you. If I say ten trivial things a day, then other people have ten chances to start a conversation they might not have started otherwise. I dated a girl who I basically met on Facebook Chat, and I strengthened a lot of friendships with people I rarely saw IRL but bullshitted with online a lot. Yet this is social behavior rather than productive. Its only aim is conversation.

Of course, this social software also makes it much harder to pay attention to work, which is why I dropped Facebook for Google+ and now am slowly phasing away from Google+ too. It's a shame that these social sites don't differentiate play from meaningful construction. Come up with a way of filtering people's noise from their signal, so that you can decide: do I want to see important information? Or do I want a lot of time-wasting bullshit? (There is a time for such things, I feel; I've tried cutting it out of my life entirely but it's no fun to be all business all the time.) Perhaps this is a problem that should be solved by using two separate mediums for communication, but that's inconvenient.

Anyway, it's food for thought, and it's going to make me reconsider how freely I fling nonsense around the internet. Thank you.

I do that, and it's the greatest thing ever.

For 3 years now, I've had a full-time assistant who filters all my email, handles the FAQs, and only leaves a few per-day for me - just the ones that only I know the answer to.

Anyone interested in this, feel free to email me for details.