5ish - An Email To Talk About Email Hell
I often say that my goal in life is to get to a place where I no longer need to check email. It’s a funny thing to say. It sounds like a pretty low bar. And just a weird thing to aspire towards. And yet, it’s true. I’ve ranted about email for years and years at this point. I even quit using it for awhile when I was a reporter years ago as sort of a stunt — it was glooooorious. I want to get back to that world, but it’s next to impossible now in our current world, of course. Anyway, people are sick of hearing me complain about email at this point — my wife, most especially — but it was top of mind this week reading two pieces by Cal Newport. He actually has a new book on the topic, which these posts are excerpted from (I have not yet read the book, nor do I know Cal — this isn’t SponCon). In his “E-mail Is Making Us Miserable” piece for The New Yorker, we get gems like:
And:
And:
And finally:
All of the above pretty accurately conveys my feeling about email. It’s not that the format is evil, nor is any individual sending it, it’s that it wasn’t designed with the notion of what would happen with these messages sent and received in aggregate, at scale. In another piece, this time for Wired, we get:
Utterly insanity. And still going up. That was something I used to get a lot: push back along the lines of “boo hoo, you’re too popular”, but that wasn’t it at all, I was just ahead of a curve that was and is coming for everyone.
This is like the famous example of how when you expand the number of lanes on freeways to ease traffic, the traffic just expands to fill the new bandwidth. If you make email clients faster, we’ll just get more email even faster as more of it will be sent even faster. And so I wait. A Smattering of Links
A Selection of Blog Posts
A Collection of Essays🏨 “Whopping”Can Airbnb ever turn a profit?! (Oh, aside from the profits they’ve historically turned.) 🎥 Remember the Alamo DrafthouseA standoff for one of the last great movie theater chains Uncertainty |
Older messages
A Year Ago, On the Road
Wednesday, February 17, 2021
I stopped traveling one year ago...
Back to Life
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Or so we hope...
A Sense of Spring
Friday, November 13, 2020
An election over, a new surge started, hope...
'5G' Will Be the Least Interesting Element of Apple's iPhone Event Tomorrow
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
Sizes and colors and 5nm, oh my!
Pivot Back to Phone Calls
Monday, September 28, 2020
Is Zoom actually analogous to in-person at all?
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