The E-Mail Trap
A Twitter friend, @marismith, has just returned from a long vacation RVing across Alaska and the Canadian west. She discovered 1200 e-mails waiting for her.
I got thinking about that number. In the old days, a couple of years ago, we would have been talking about phone messages. 1200 messages? Nope, no way. People would call and realize that you were not home and either leave a message or wait until you got back.
She was gone four to six weeks. Being a bright and educated user of the Internet, I’m sure she had her e-mail set to reply an “out of office” message.
Without knowing a thing about her situation, my guess was that she had a lot of spam. With the best filter, I still get 6-8 spam e-mails a day. I also have Google alerts, and daily e-mails from job hunting sites.
I’m on a couple of military mailing lists, so I get a bunch of press releases from Iraq. Bloggers’ Roundtable generates a few more e-mails each week.
I get the odd e-mail from family and friends, but if I were on vacation they’d know not to e-mail me. I get social media notifies for friends and followers.
Someone signed me up for the Pajamas Media morning summary, feh. I’m on the HARO list for 3 e-mails each weekday.
Sadly, examining the preceding, most of my e-mail comes from lists and not people. [frown]
OK, so to the 1200. Find the obvious spams and delete. Find the e-mails from the various lists and delete those that are too old to be useful.
Mari gets 30-40 e-mails a day. I get about half that. She’s got 120-240 e-mails that she will want to spend time on, my guess.
But none of this would have happened if she only had an answering machine.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Original writing, Commentary, Original writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Hi Chuck,
Thanks for the mention!
A few corrections:
I’ve been living fulltime in my RV with my hubby since July 07 and run my business entirely from the road.
The 1200+ email backlog was only from five days of attending two back-to-back conferences in Las Vegas.
I have a couple layers of spam filters in place, and my VA helps with general email.
One of the challenges with today’s uber connected social media world, is we have numerous input points now, not just our email inbox. I get almost as much Facebook mail as I do mail to my regular domain. I get more like 300-400 emails a day.
Plus, add in Twitter replies and DMs, messages from LinkedIn, Plaxo, and all manner of social networks. Not to mention my Google alerts and RSS feed reader.
It’s certainly no wonder Tim Ferriss opts for a low-information diet. However, much as I love Tim and his concepts, I also love Gary Vaynerchuck and his relentless passion for responding to all email. So it’s a matter of setting up systems, leveraging and delegating then carving out enough time to manage all these inputs!
Cheers,
Mari
@marismith