The other day I did something that felt both liberating and faintly rebellious, like ordering a second drink at lunch. I set the auto responder on my personal email to the following:
“I am admitting defeat. I have lost prompt-response contact with this form of inbound communication. If your message has a time factor, please reach out via text or book some time via (my calendar link).”
In other words: email can eat it.
I am done with the expectation that email is allowed to sit there all day tugging at my pant leg like a needy toddler while I attempt to do literally anything else, because the real issue is the sheer quantity of ways that other humans can now reach into your pocket and say, essentially, “Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey.”
When I entered the adult workforce around 1993, the situation was manageable.
You had a desk phone. It rang. You answered it, or you didn’t. If you didn’t, a little red light blinked and someone left a voicemail that sounded like a hostage negotiation: “Hi Alan this is Bob from accounting calling about the — uh — invoice — uh — call me back.” You called Bob back. Society continued.
There was also email, but in those days it arrived the way mail used to arrive in Victorian novels: once or twice a day. Nobody expected a response before you’d finished the sandwich currently in your hand.
Fax machines existed, but mercifully they were confined to the sort of bureaucratic outposts that also had rubber stamps and a man named Gerald guarding a three-ring binder.
Then the floodgates opened.
Now there is email, obviously, but also texting, and Slack, and Teams, and WhatsApp, and Signal, and LinkedIn messages, and the mysterious “DM,” which can arrive from inside any social media platform that has decided it is now a communications platform rather than a place to look at pictures of someone’s golden retriever.
Every one of these tools believes it is the primary tool.
Slack assumes you are watching Slack.
Text assumes you are watching text.
Email assumes you are watching email.
LinkedIn assumes you are dying to hear from a man named Kyle who would like to connect to explore synergies, which interestingly is also the domain of Tinder and Grindr.
All of them make noises. All of them light up your phone. All of them feel vaguely urgent, like a smoke alarm that might be real or might just be a bagel.
And of course we have invented new social expectations to go along with them.
Somewhere along the way, people began using read receipts. This is a technological innovation whose sole purpose is to let another adult know that you have seen their message and are currently choosing not to answer it.
Nothing makes a person crankier.
You read a message during a meeting, thinking you’ll reply later, and suddenly the sender is tapping their foot across the digital universe.
“Hey, just bumping this.”
“?”
“Did you see this?”
Yes, I saw it. I was briefly in the same room with it. I simply did not feel the need to respond within the 90-second window required by modern civilization.
Then there are emoji, which have quietly become a second language.
In theory, emoji are delightful. In practice, some people now communicate entirely through a sequence of tiny cartoons that appear to represent laughter, rockets, prayer hands, and a small yellow face weeping tears of either joy or existential despair.
It is possible — indeed common — to receive a message that reads:
“Quick question ”
What question? About what? Why is it on fire? Whatcha saying here, Mom?
So yes, I have surrendered one channel. Email may now wait patiently until I arrive with coffee and emotional readiness.
If something is urgent, there are still nine other ways to reach me.
And if it isn’t urgent, then it will survive until I get around to it, which is how communication worked for the first several thousand years of civilization and somehow we all managed to get by just fine.