by John Freeman
2. The Physical World Matters.
Here in the United States one can see what technology has done to rural areas. The small community of a hundred years ago, while it has not vanished, is becoming more and more rare as young people go to towns and cities, where there are work and action.
— EDWARD T. HALL, Beyond Culture
The longer we work at speed over virtual forms of communication, the harder it will become to maintain real-world meeting places. Some electronic communication—political organizing, party planning, setting up meetings of any kind, browsing Google’s book archive for research—leads to interactions in the tangible here and now. All these activities must be transported to physical-world venues. But a large part of electronic communication leads us away from the physical world. Our cafés, post offices, parks, cinemas, town centers, main streets, and community meeting halls have suffered as a result of this development. They are beginning to resemble the tidy and lonely bedroom commuter towns created by the expansion of the American interstate system. Sitting in the modern coffee shop, you don’t hear the murmur or rise and fall of conversation but the continuous, insectlike patter of typing. The disuse of real-world commons drives people back into the virtual world, causing a feedback cycle that leads to an ever-deepening isolation and neglect of the tangible commons.
This is a terrible loss. We may rely heavily on the Internet, but we cannot touch it, taste it, or experience the indescribable feeling of togetherness that one gleans from face-to-face interaction, from the reassuring sensation of being among a crowd of one’s neighbors. Seeing one another in these situations reinforces the importance of sharing resources, of working together, of balancing our own needs with those of others. Online, these values become notions that are much more easily suspended to further our own self-interest. Not surprisingly, political movements that begin online must have a real-world component; otherwise they evaporate and dissolve into the blur of other activities.
It is in the interest of large consumer businesses to continue this erosion of the physical commons, however. Storefronts are expensive; retail space can sit empty. Warehoused stock loses value and costs money. Consumers who can be redirected online are effectively helping companies do business in the cheapest way possible, in an environment where they can be pitched to and advertised to more aggressively than ever before. It is almost impossible to navigate the Web without having to stutter-step around ads and blinking messages from sponsors.
In using this tool so heavily, consumers aren’t just frying their attention spans, they’re forfeiting one of the large sources of information that comes from face-to-face interaction and business. A butcher can tell you which cuts of meat are the freshest; an online grocer may not. That same butcher, if he is good, might not just remember your preferences—which an online retailer can do frighteningly well—but ask you how your mother has been doing, whether you caught the latest football game. These interactions remind us that we are more than consumers; they remind us that we are part of the world in a way no amount of online shopping ever will.
The Internet’s so-called global village is a consumerist dream—ultimate choice, the ability to shop for the lowest price—but, except for the rare tool that redirects back to local businesses, it erodes our ability to get the things we want locally and uses up precious resources while doing so. The Slow Food movement recognized this twenty years ago, when delegates from fifteen countries drafted a manifesto. “In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes,” they wrote. In other words, we may be able to get oranges from Chile and water from Switzerland, but the carbon emissions involved in shipping them to our doorstep so we can enjoy them are destroying our environment and putting local growers and farmers out of business.
Communication works the same way. If we spend our evening online trading short messages over Facebook with friends thousands of miles away rather than going to our local pub or park with a friend, we are effectively withdrawing from the people we could turn to for solace, humor, and friendship, not to mention the places we could go to do this. We trade the complicated reality of friendship for its vacuum-packed idea. We exchange the real sensual pleasure of sharing a meal or going for a walk—activities that sustain the tangible commons—for the disembodied excitement of being talked to or heard online. Sitting at an outdoor café and having a conversation, browsing for books with a friend in a bookstore, we cannot help but confront the physical world and help maintain its upkeep; chatting online, we can go hours without remembering we are looking into a screen.
3. Context Matters.
Relying on screens, on typing at high speed, we have constructed an environment in which it is more difficult than ever to get a sense of context. We may now be able to shop around for news, but in doing so we have made it harder for one news source to bring it to us effectively. We can chat and correspond faster than ever with colleagues down the hall, but these virtual exchanges tell us far less than a phone conversation or in-person debate. We can receive love letters and licentious gossip faster than ever, but the rate at which such missives come in, followed by yet more correspondence, deprives us of the necessary mental space in which to properly frame our response.
Sitting at the center of it all, our inbox filling up by the hour, makes us feel in control, but the way it has shrunk our frame of reference leads to an ever-widening cultural passivity. We comment glibly rather than engage; there just isn’t time. We dial out of news cycles, because there will be a new story tomorrow. We check in with friends in short text messages about inane topics rather than sit down for a proper chat or withdraw to write a letter that can impart thoughts and emotions and give us a sense of our tangible selves in our handwriting, in our choice of stamp, that even the most elegantly composed e-mail will lack.
We need context in order to live, and if the environment of electronic communication has stopped providing it, we shouldn’t search online for a solution but turn back to the real world and slow down. To do this, we need to uncouple our idea of progress from speed, separate the idea of speed from efficiency, pause and step back enough to realize that efficiency may be good for business and governments but does not always lead to mindfulness and sustainable, rewarding relationships. We are here for a short time on this planet, and reacting to demands on our time by simply speeding up has canceled out many of the benefits of the Internet, which is one of the most fabulous technological inventions ever conceived. We are connected, yes, but we were before, only by gossamer threads that worked more slowly. Slow communication will preserve these threads and our ability to sensibly choose to use faster modes when necessary. It will also preserve our sanity, our families, our relationships, and our ability to find happiness in a world where, in spite of the Internet, saying what we mean is as hard as it ever was. It starts with a simple instruction: Don’t send.
7
DON’T SEND
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
—DON KNUTH, STANFORD UNIVERSITY
In the next decade, the e-mail onslaught will continue to build and build and then build some more. As more people go online, as companies grow and expand internationally, as the pace of globalization increases, our inboxes will become as snarled as Los Angeles freeways during the morning commute. Fewer and fewer parts of the world will be untouched by wireless Internet access; in the summer of 2008, Delta Air Lines became the latest U.S. carrier to announce it would begin offering Internet access on flights. When you can get wireless access five miles above the earth while traveling at 600 miles per hour, you’ll soon be able to get it just about anywhere.
If we don’t pause to think about whether we need this tool available to us all the time, it will strangle our workdays like a creeper vine on steroids and keep us tied to our machines and our inboxes
right up until we crawl into bed. If we all keep agreeing to be continuously available long beyond the working days, deep into our vacations, and everywhere on the street, it will become harder and harder to step away from the computer or the screen. Those who do will be viewed as eccentrics or, worse, cranky Luddites who simply can’t handle the modern world.
There are several things you can do to take back control of your life and your workdays and the mental space that is necessary to mindfulness and happy living. I know, since I have watched it happen. Six months before beginning this book, I was receiving two to three hundred messages a day. I would log on in the morning and watch new e-mail march down my Outlook screen with a small bubble of joy—I was needed!— and a mountain of dread: if I didn’t respond to these messages, I would offend people, miss out on some key piece of business, add to the ever-increasing backlog of messages that was growing like a mulch pile in leaf season.
Trying to keep up with my e-mail, trying to get out in front of it, though, I made every e-mail mistake there was and invented some new ones. I sent “thanks” messages and cluttered inboxes with forwards; I sent messages without properly reading what I was replying to, creating more e-mail; I sent messages in a charged emotional state and definitely offended recipients; I read messages too quickly and was offended myself; I checked my e-mail late at night and first thing in the morning, shrinking my frame of reference to what came in over the e-mail transom, ruining my sleep, and driving my partner crazy through my constant zombielike attachment to my glowing machine; I mistyped and sent messages to the wrong people, forwarded messages without looking at what was in the thread; I subscribed to far too many Listservs and news feeds, making my inbox a combination of to-do list, mailbox, and newspaper; I tried to coordinate complicated conversations and watched them dissolve into name-calling through lack of face-to-face interaction; I got so much e-mail that messages from the people I love got buried and I never answered them.
I began to trawl the Web and the bookstore, looking for solutions. There are dozens of books on e-mail overload, and many of them have helpful solutions. But none of them expands the focus beyond the past fifteen years, which seems like a massive oversight, given that we have leapfrogged far beyond previous generations’ rate of correspondence into a stratosphere that feels beyond human capacity. Furthermore, many of the books I looked at recommended yet more technology to solve the problem of e-mail overload. What I am going to recommend here, then, can be accomplished with very few add-ons and further buy-ins to the current system. It begins, too, with one very simple recommendation.
1. Don’t Send
The most important thing you can do to improve the state of your inbox, free up your attention span, and break free of the tyranny of e-mail is not to send an e-mail. As most people now know, e-mail only creates more e-mail, so by stepping away from the messaging treadmill, even if for a moment every day, you instantly dial down the speed of the e-mail messagopolis. Your silence doesn’t just affect your inbox, it has a compounded effect on the people to whom you didn’t send messages: not getting your message will release some time for them to deal with something besides e-mail; and the less time they spend on e-mail, the less e-mail they will send; and so on.
Pausing for even a minute will also give you a chance to ask yourself several key questions that, if they become routine, will vastly improve your ability to use e-mail effectively. Before you send a message, ask yourself: Is this message essential? Does it need to arrive there instantly? Why am I sending it? What expectations or precedents will it set? If you’re sending a message to a friend on vacation, why not send a postcard? You might say less, but the physical object will mean more. If it’s a message to let someone know you’re just thinking about them, why not pick up the phone and leave your friend a voice mail? There are tones and textures to your voice that words cannot convey.
In Conversation: The History of a Declining Art, Stephen Miller describes how, as the habit of visiting people in their homes for meals and get-togethers has declined, our ability to hold interesting and rewarding conversations has deteriorated. Relying on e-mail to maintain friendships will only further this downward spiral, because the medium atrophies our ability to listen in real time, where it’s considered inappropriate to simply talk. Instead of sending your pal an e-mail or forwarding him a joke, make a date to meet him for coffee. Invite him over for dinner. It might feel uncomfortable at first, but the conversation you have in person will go a lot farther toward keeping your friendship going than a dozen e-mails and text messages scattered over the course of three months.
Not sending e-mail—by which I mean sending a lot less of it—might be difficult at work, but your coworkers will thank you. Eighty percent of corporate e-mail problems are caused by 1 percent of workers who use it inefficiently; are you in that 1 percent? The survey that turned up this statistic showed that one of the biggest generators of excess mail is a medium-sized message sent to a group of people, which then causes a pinball effect as people chime in and comment, having a virtual discussion. If you have a question or a piece of information that is important enough to warrant such a discussion, pick up the phone: it will save everyone involved a series of short interruptions and mitigate the risk of tonal misunderstandings, which, as we have seen, can impede your ability to collaborate in the future.
Not sending e-mail will also help to break people out of the culture of the endless paper(less) trail. If you’re working with several people on a project, do all of them need to know you have viewed a piece of information or completed a small task? Giving in to this impulse to cc and bcc sets an expectation of constant contact that actually prevents workers from getting their individual tasks done. This lesson applies to people who work with clients, too; if you e-mail them about every small detail, they will begin to expect that level of hand-holding all the time, even if it multiplies opportunities for miscommunication and eats up time you could be spending on doing your job. If a client is particularly demanding, batch your feedback so you can send an e-mail twice a week that summarizes a number of developments. If you absolutely must create a paper(less) trail, discuss what you are agreeing to do by phone and then send one short follow-up e-mail summarizing what you agreed upon.
2. Don’t Check It First Thing in the Morning or Late at Night
Studies have shown that skipping breakfast deprives us of energy for the rest of the day and alters our metabolism. Eating late at night has a reverse effect and can lead to irregular sleep patterns. What we feed our brain at these times has a similar effect on our minds. In Nicholson Baker’s novel A Box of Matches, a man starts his day by lighting a match and meditating for the time it takes the flame to burn out, which puts him in a calmer frame of mind. “What you do first thing can influence your whole day,” he discovers. “If the first thing you do is stump to the computer in your pajamas to check your e-mail, blinking and plucking your proverbs, you’re going to be in a hungry electronic funk all morning,” he says. “So don’t do it.”
Not checking your e-mail first thing will also reinforce a boundary between your work and your private life, which is essential if you want to be fully present in either place. If you check your e-mail before getting to work, you will probably begin to worry about work matters before you actually get there. Checking your e-mail first thing at home doesn’t give you a jump on the workday; it just extends it. Sending e-mail before and after office hours has a compounded effect, since it creates an environment in which workers are tacitly expected to check their e-mail at the same time and squeeze more work out of their tired bodies.
E-mailing at night creates the same workaholic cycle, especially if it is an executive or higher-up doing it. Every company has a boss who is infamous for logging on and sending messages at three in the morning. This is an incredibly destructive habit, since it encourages other employees to prove they are working just as hard, by responding when they should be entering their third REM cycle or sending messages on the road, on
vacation, over weekends. If you are one of these early-morning e-mailers, simply put your message into a draft and send it during business hours; if the idea or information you wanted to pass along was essential enough to wake you, it will be no less relevant when you wake up from a decent night’s sleep.
There are, of course, professions in which this rule will be difficult to follow. Investment bankers who depend on keeping up with foreign markets, reporters who are covering breaking stories, doctors who are operating on a patient in need of a new organ, and political campaign employees who have to keep up with a 24/7 news cycle are just a few examples. They will find it nearly impossible not to check e-mail late at night to coordinate and push projects forward. It’s important to note, however, that all of these professions have very high levels of burnout; if you’re not in one of these jobs but communicate at their frenzied rates, you are applying a false standard to your work environment.
Just living in the new global workplace isn’t a reason to try to keep up the current e-mail pace. Luis Suarez, a social computing evangelist for IBM who lives on the Canary Islands and reports to managers in the United States and Holland, recently decided to wean himself off his e-mail habit. Within a week he found that he had cut back the amount of e-mail in his inbox by 80 percent. He accomplished this by using Web-based free tools such as blogs, where he could post information and make it available to a large group of people; social networking sites, which build trust; and instant messaging, which allows him to interact in real time when it is important. He also just stopped sending a lot of e-mail. Suarez found he got much more done and had more time to enjoy, well, being on the Canary Islands.
