Email = Everywhere Mail?

Boy, was life easy without email. I remember the times well, when only about two handful of folks I knew had an email address, in fact, it wasn't called email, but we used things like Bitnet and EARN (short for the European Academic Research Network) to send messages across the world. It was the coolest thing. Later, with HONE and PROFS things got a little more comfortable, but limited to corporate networks. Special gateways connected to university networks were needed to route a PROFS note to the outside world. These days, email is more of a curse, and not only because of spam. The sheer number of official emails, from colleagues and clients, PR agencies both good and bad, the boss, the real boss (wife), family and friends, is so staggering that the medium becomes almost unusable. 300 emails a day, only scanned for important content at a rate of 30 seconds each equals to 150 minutes or 2.5 hours of doing nothing but opening (and mostly deleting) emails. This is nonsense.

Now I have folks asking me why I'm not enabling emails to be pushed to my mobile. Apparently, I am not responding in the expected timeframe. What is an appropriate timeframe anyway? The idea behind email was its asynchronous model: send anytime, read anytime. Now email becomes more and more an instant messaging construct, where people with Blackberries or similar devices instantly jump up from anywhere (dinners, theatres, meetings, etc) to attend to the buzz in their pocket. I'd think that the constant interruption alone causes a significant productivity hit, adding to the flipside of email drowning.

For the time being, I will not enable any push service to my mobile. I'll gladly replicate my calendar with my Sony P910, but nothing else. If something is that super-important that it can't wait, I'm expecting a phone call, not an email.