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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Forget spam -- our real conundrum is the overload of legitimate e-mail. But help is coming.
Jul 16, 2004 | Early in June, Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, found himself confronting an extreme version of a problem familiar to many of us -- an overflowing e-mail box. Lessig, a polymath whose sharp critiques of copyright law have made him famous online, receives a great deal of mail. On a typical day, between 100 and 200 messages (not counting spam) will crash into his in box, and, incredibly, he manages to keep up with most of it. But over the years, one of Lessig's mail folders -- a box called Reply To, stuffed with messages from strangers he felt deserved some kind of response -- had ballooned to intolerable proportions. By June, Reply To contained almost a thousand messages. That's when Lessig had an epiphany. "I realized I wasn't ever going to be able to reply to it all," he says. "I have a son who's 10 months old. I saw that I could spend the time answering e-mail, or I could spend the time with my son. So that's what motivated me to do it."
What Lessig did wasn't very novel -- he gave up. Answering the mail in his Reply To folder was going to take time, and he had better ways to spend it. But where you or I might simply have deleted the waiting messages, Lessig decided to appeal to the Karmic Gods of the Internet. "Dear person who sent me a yet-unanswered e-mail," Lessig wrote in a rueful form letter to each of his would-be correspondents. "I apologize, but I am declaring e-mail bankruptcy." Under the terms of this "bankruptcy," Lessig explained, he would ignore all the messages in his brimming folder, but he would allow the senders to write back to him if they really, truly wanted to get his attention. "It was an extraordinarily liberating act," Lessig says now. He mailed out hundreds of the bankruptcy notices, and only about 30 people sent back further missives. "I cleared those within a week."
Even though it worked pretty well, Lessig's declaration of "e-mail bankruptcy" as a response to e-mail overload is the kind of thing a psychotherapist might call a "coping mechanism" -- a desperate effort to gain a measure of control over a medium that increasingly feels beyond all control. Lessig is not alone in searching for some way to cope: These days we are all constantly bombarded with more messages than we can reasonably be expected to deal with, and in the absence of any perfect way to manage the mail, we've all kludged together ad-hoc methods of surviving.
The problems with e-mail go far beyond spam; indeed, for all the grousing over spam, getting rid of easily identifiable unsolicited commercial mail is probably one of the easier tricks engineers will pull off in the years ahead. The real crisis is with the legitimate mail -- we're drowning in it. Every day, dozens or hundreds of people -- people we want to keep in touch with -- use e-mail to make demands on our time. And it's not only the volume of mail that's killing us, it's also the variety. If you're a "knowledge worker" -- and who isn't a knowledge worker these days? -- just about every facet of your life is tracked by e-mail. You use mail not just to communicate, but to order and organize your existence: E-mail's where we keep our travel itineraries, our tax forms, our doctor's appointment reminders, our wedding pictures. If the cops were ever to ask you what you were doing on the night of so and so, where, besides e-mail, would you look for your alibi? (And just ask Henry Blodget or Martha Stewart where the cops would look for incriminating evidence.)
But if e-mail is so good, why does it feel so bad, especially for those of us who send and receive a lot of mail? Why can't today's dominant e-mail programs (such as Microsoft's Outlook or Qualcomm's Eudora) automatically prioritize your messages in your in box, or easily search for one old message hidden in a stash of hundreds of thousands? Why, instead, do we need to construct elaborate triage strategies -- sorting, filtering, filing, redirecting, etc. -- just to make sure we don't miss anything important? And, despite these, why do we still so often miss what is important, and why are we bombarded by the trivial? Why, most fundamentally, must we constantly work on our e-mail, vigilantly imposing our own schemes of order upon the incoming chaos, constantly guarding against getting behind, against the shame of e-mail bankruptcy?
The obvious weaknesses of e-mail have led many experts over the years to predict that e-mail's end is nigh, and today, tech leaders routinely pronounce e-mail dead. But the truth is not so dire. A host of companies, among them Google, have recently introduced some very novel e-mail programs, and are determined to make e-mail a little easier than it is today. They'll probably never make it perfect, but help is on the way.
