It's been a long time for most of us since email was something other than a depressing form of slavery in our work and social lives.
Either we receive too much unsolicited and irrelevant email for us to find the useful messages, or we chain ourselves to an hour or more each day answering correspondence just to keep the pile from growing out of hand.
From the other side, it's also become common for us to send a carefully crafted message to someone and discover that they have only scanned it briefly, or that they've never even seen it in the blizzard of messages they receive. And heaven help us if they are trying to manage both work and personal email accounts separately.
I used to teach a micro-class in productivity that addressed some of this and offered tactics to keep the email pile to a manageable level. (Okay, I still teach the class, but I think the focus will begin to change.) We can talk all day about tactics, and maybe even adopt some of them as habits, but the root cause will not disappear.
There is good news however!
Either we receive too much unsolicited and irrelevant email for us to find the useful messages, or we chain ourselves to an hour or more each day answering correspondence just to keep the pile from growing out of hand.
From the other side, it's also become common for us to send a carefully crafted message to someone and discover that they have only scanned it briefly, or that they've never even seen it in the blizzard of messages they receive. And heaven help us if they are trying to manage both work and personal email accounts separately.
I used to teach a micro-class in productivity that addressed some of this and offered tactics to keep the email pile to a manageable level. (Okay, I still teach the class, but I think the focus will begin to change.) We can talk all day about tactics, and maybe even adopt some of them as habits, but the root cause will not disappear.
There is good news however!
