Other People's Agendas

As promised I want to discuss email. Initially, I was going to talk about how irritating it is when people don’t read my very important emails to them, but after dealing with my own inbox this morning, I am reconsidering that angle.

I have a love-hate relationship with email. It has devolved over the last 20 years from something I loved for its convenience to something that I now loathe for its ubiquity.

My first email account was gifted to me as a freshman in college but I didn’t use it until my junior year and I only used it for two purposes:

-To chat with a high school friend of mine who went to college in another city and,

-To sign-up for a list serve. You remember those – list serves were pre-www social media. They connected people with similar interests and you could send emails to the list serve and have virtual discussions with other subscribers. The one I subscribed to was a discussion of the first amendment and it was moderated by my college advisor.

It WORE ME OUT.

A few times a week, I’d login to my email account at the law library so I could chat with my friend and I had to rifle through dozens of list serve emails that I didn’t care about. Let me clarify…I cared deeply about the First Amendment (and still do), I just didn’t care to read all the pseudo-academic-but-mostly-conclusory invectives about the First Amendment from every political science student and professor on or off campus who considered their opinion on Free Speech to be worthy of a dissertation-length email. The best thing I can say is that it this list serve probably saved a lot of trees because most of it would have been a giant waste of paper.

I suffered through this and never unsubscribed because, not knowing exactly how it worked, I was afraid it would alert my college advisor to my disinterest and I decided it was a bad idea to piss him off. Interestingly, my feeling about this list serve subscription foreshadowed my future (current) feelings about email in general, but as with many things, it was a gradual deterioration.

After college, email became the go-to method of long-distance communication for all of my people who were scattered about the country. Email was free -- for those of us with reasonable employers -- in a world where nothing was free. It was so much easier and faster to stay connected when I could quickly type a short note and it would instantly appear in someone's inbox. When i received a response, a notification would pop up on my work screen letting me know I had a new message. If I was expecting an email, I would check obsessively to see if one had come and I had missed the notification. In hindsight maybe our employers shouldn’t have been quite so reasonable. I’m positive that this switch-tasking caused productivity to suffer. But we were content so maybe this technology perk made up for the cost. The world may never know.

I looked forward to email like I had once looked forward to snail mail. Snail mail had become an irritant filled with direct mail marketing crap and bills – no fun at all – but email filled the void and there was exponentially more of it. I especially loved it once I began dating someone who lived 1000 miles away. The happy anticipation which accompanied each alerting ding increased by a factor of 10 once he came into the picture because every email could be from him.

This happy co-existence with email continued for years. As internet use increased, I used my email account to sign up for online shopping accounts which provided emails about sales. I signed up for informational emails and job postings and social announcements when I was working. After I moved and got married, I added subscriptions to daily digests from The Washington Post and New York Times. When I got pregnant, I subscribed to Babycenter and received weekly emails about what was going on inside my body throughout my pregnancy. I also received coupons for everything I could possibly need (and not need) to get ready for our baby. After my children were born, I had a group of moms in town who all stayed in touch via email helping each other with advice and support and scheduling playdates and meals for new moms.

Email was great and life was good.

And then technology turned on us. Soon there was texting. And instant messaging. And then social media. And smart phones. And suddenly email was just a nuisance. Almost overnight, my personal bubble was invaded and saturated with every sort of electronic transmission possible. Email was just another way that people could attempt to make their agenda my agenda and it was, by far, the most likely to encourage long-windedness.

Every email seemed like a treatise on the First Amendment.

All those informational emails, daily digests, and sale announcements that were so great once – became digital junk mail almost overnight. And because there was so much of everything I started to feel annoyed by even personal emails because there was just too much to sort through. I used to just delete all the stuff I didn’t have time for (which some days was everything) in bulk each morning when I woke up. When this became too time-consuming, I started indiscriminately unsubscribing from everything. But it seemed that as I unsubscribed from one thing, two new regular emails would appear daily in their place. It was endless work. Then I joined the DO NOT EMAIL list and the spam stopped…or at least it got chunked in some folder where I never had to see it.

For a short time, my inbox was manageable...and then my kids started Middle School. 

Middle School was like a lakes-worth of water being dumped on any smoldering love that may have remained in my heart for email. EVERY teacher sent us an email EVERY week – some sent multiple emails a week – one sent multiple emails a day. When my daughter started 6^th grade it was bad enough, but when I had both of them there, well…it actually made me cry one day. There was always the option to unsubscribe through the school’s communication system but, there were some communications that I needed to receive. I would estimate that about 1 out of every 100 emails required my attention, so I had a choice, (a) deal with the 99 that didn’t matter or (b) login to the school’s information system every day to make sure that I didn’t miss the 1 that did matter.

It’s like having to choose between being water-boarded and being burned with cigarettes.

The most aggravating aspect was that the vast majority of these emails were alerting us to things for which our kids were ultimately responsible -- things they were assigned in class. In the end, I chose to keep receiving these emails (so that I don’t miss the 100^th which is actually of relevance to me) but devised a genius method for making sure my kids had access to this information at home. I wasn't quite ready for them to have their own email accounts so I set up folders in my email account for them to check. The stuff for me stays in my inbox and the stuff for them goes in their folder. Problem solved.

But back to people who don't read my emails. I am endeavoring to manage antipathy and sympathy -- because it really irritates me, but I totally get it. Emails are like opinions...everyone has one to share and everyone thinks theirs is the most important. And now we receive reminder texts and automated phone calls too. There are just too many ways for people to get in contact with us and we are overconnected in all the bad ways and disconnected in all the meaningful ways.

And, once again, it’s all someone else’s agenda.

I guess what it comes down to is that we all have to make choices as to whose agenda will take priority at any given moment. We are thankfully free to do this, but it does mean being prepared to accept the consequences. Missed a volunteer opportunity that would have prevented me being fined or having to fund-raise later? Oops, I better be okay with shelling out some money. Missed the email detailing when my son’s project was due? And he turned it in late? I better be OK with his grades being his responsibility (which I ABSOLUTELY AM). Missed a Groupon for a massage? I’ll have to just rely on my foam roller I guess.

The good news is, with one kid in high school (where the incessant emails are a modest fraction of what they were in middle school), there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Between that, the daily unsubscribing to meaningless drivel, and my adamant refusal to subscribe to anything new, I have managed to reduce my incoming email to a manageable level. Now when important stuff arrives, I don’t feel resentful about having to read it and I haven't missed anything too vital. Yet.

Maybe someday email will become like a landline -- something we only use in an emergency.