What did we ever do before there were e-mails?
Honestly, I don’t remember. Ah, yes. Phone calls. Well, we don’t do that anymore, but that is a subject for another blog. Let’s talk about e-mails.
Today, I fired up the Mac and discovered I had 250 e-mails in my In Box. That’s too many. They didn’t all arrive overnight; some have been hanging around for weeks, because they might be relevant later, they were part of projects still on-going, it cheered me up to look at them (“job well done”), or I just hadn’t figured out what to do with them.
How did they get there? I’m sure every profession has its e-mail producers, but for writers, journalists, and marketers, it’s a bewildering collection for sure. I once wrote a story about the housing market, so now I hear from every housing related outlet west of Moscow. But they said they wouldn’t give your email to anyone else–that horse left the barn ages ago.
Here, There and Everywhere
Governments and legal related firms are prodigious producers of e-mails; they must have small armies churning them out all day. Purely social e-mails from friends and relatives–must have those, otherwise how would you stay in touch? I have one buddy who pings my phone with text messages referencing articles he finds interesting–I can hear the thing going off in the middle of the night. I’d tell him to cut it out, but he’s a good friend.
LinkedIn sends a lot of e-mails. They tell you who the 859 members of your network have linked up with and you have no idea who these people are. But, sometimes out of the blue, something will happen because of LinkedIn, so I don’t turn them off either.
It occurs to me that if you get a lot of e-mails–and if you don’t you can turn up the volume fairly easily–and you’re active on LinkedIn, or other social networks, you can pretty much fill up the day just doing that. Not knocking it even if you do, but I need to produce, so I have to limit the rest of it.
The e-mails must be managed. I try to keep the In Box for “action items,” those relating to current projects. The Mac allows me to set up subsidiary e-mail boxes so they become the “this might be interesting later” box, or the contacts box, or the box related to this client or that job.
I keep all sent e-mails, which are in the thousands. But it’s worth it. You may be called upon to recall a past e-mail, repeat it, or explain it. Hard to believe, but people sometimes lose the e-mails you send. When they do, you can hit forward, put their address in, and send it again.
Dealing with, or responding to e-mails is a task in itself. Some of us prefer to deal with them as they roll in, since some only require a brief answer and can be done quickly. Ones that require a thoughtful response might rest in the box until we think of something. Needless to say, responding when rushed, distracted, or angry can have negative side effects, depending upon who the recipient might be. Others prefer to let them build up and deal with them all at once, though this can be overwhelming if the volume is great.
If you feel as though you get too many e-mails, cheer up. It’s at least a measure of some sort of popularity, and on balance, too many e-mails is probably better than too few.
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