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From Josh Glenn, Editorial Director:

Call me anal if you must, but I just love it when my e-mail's "in-box" is clean. I mean clean: that rare state of in-boxiness in which every single e-mail I've received, ever, has been responded to, trashed, or filed away (I love filing my e-mail, but that's another story). The Empty In-Box. Zero K. Sigh... Unfortunately, like all pie-in-the-sky types I am doomed to a life of perpetual frustration.

This Monday morning — like every Monday morning since I first started working 9-to-5 (about three years ago now) — I walked straight to my desk, took off my jacket, turned my computer's monitor on, and sat down to check my e-mail. That is to say, I downloaded the e-mail which had been sent to me between Friday evening (when I walked out of the office at 6:00 PM, leaving a deliciously empty in-box behind) and Monday morning. You see, I never check my e-mail during the weekend; as a result, on Mondays my e-mail "in-box" is always bursting at the seams. I generally have at least 60 new messages on a Monday morning, sometimes more, and because I'm guaranteed to receive well over 100 subsequent e-mails during the day, my first-thing-in-the-morning haul of messages is problematic, to say the least. By the time I answer 60 messages, another 20 or 30 are sure to have arrived — many in response to the ones I've sent out in response to the ones I've just received. We're talking over 500 e-mails received (and almost that many sent) a week, easy: Tantalus and Sisyphus have got nothing on me, I tell you.

But before you start offering me advice on how to use Eudora's filters or something, let me just point out that I've been extrememly successful at filtering junk mail before it ever reaches me; mail from my family and friends goes into an alternate in-box; I subscribe to very few e-mail newsletters; and I certainly don't belong to any newsgroups. That means that the majority of the e-mail I've received between Monday morning and Friday evening was sent by my colleagues here at Tripod.

Yes, you heard me right! My own co-workers are to blame. Who are these sneaky Tripodians cluttering up my beautifully empty in-box over the weekend? Who are these snakes in the grass conspiring to rob me of my greatest workday pleasure — the state of in-box vacuity? You really want to know? Hell, I'm going to name names!

The single most active e-mailer at Tripod, I think everyone here will agree, is our beloved Executive Producer Scott, who seems actually to think-through-typing sometimes; there's probably a good German clinical word for this. Scott's e-mails are invariably brief and to the point, since he's a man on the move (many of his e-mails seem to be sent from trains, planes, and mountaintops), but there are just so many of them! Catching up with him quickly is Tripod's fabulous Producer and Creative Director Margaret, who often works weekends and late nights and proves it — her e-mails span the gamut from small questions about the navigation of a particular piece of content to huge meta-questions about Tripod's editorial voice. Margaret and Scott tend to start free-ranging conversations with each other via e-mail, into which I am often drawn (along with other unfortunate souls who happened to be standing nearby), generating dozens of e-mails a pop. The fact that Margaret and Scott and I sit five feet away from each other all day long adds a certain pathos to all of this, don't you think?

Among other major weekend and late-night e-mail offenders are Randy>, one of my pals from the editorial department, who seems to do his best thinking at 3:00 AM and likes to unload his inspirations on me right at that instant (I have to admit, his ideas are usually good ones!); Christina from the Membership department, who (along with her colleagues) has a good excuse: It's part of her job to pass along urgent and interesting, or just plain amusing, member comments and questions to the editors; and Bo, Tripod's CEO, who once confided to me that he can't fall asleep at night until he's answered all of that day's e-mail.

OK, so maybe I'm not blameless in all this. I, too, sometimes think-through-typing, as Tripod's editors will surely agree. I, too, sometimes start e-mail conversations with four other people when I could have just asked everyone to meet with me for five minutes. And I, too, have been known to stay at work late (or come in on a weekend!) for the sole purpose of answering e-mail. But at least I feel guilty about that, dammit! When Tripod's e-mail "went down" the other day, I have to admit that I was pleased. I'm certainly no Luddite, but I have become increasingly aware of how counter-productive the technologies which I use every single day to do my job can be. I'm sorry, but it should not be acceptable for people to hibernate in their offices, e-mailing people four feet away. And we all know that one seemingly harsh e-mail (unaccompanied by friendly body language or the ability to respond immediately) from a superviser can send us into a shame spiral for hours, which is completely ludicrous.

I read an article in Newsweek this spring which criticized that new form of office worker, the "Croucher," who spends all his or her time hunched over their keyboard, waiting for new e-mails to come in, so that they can zap out a response. Sure, e-mail has lots of advantages: It allows us to communicate with one another without interruption (sort of); it allows us to communicate lots of information in an efficient way (sort of); and it leaves a nice paper trail, serving as a sort of external memory for us frail humans (sort of). But 500 e-mails a week! Over an hour spent every morning just answering mail from the night before! No, this is too much. According to that article in Newsweek, one company's chairman felt the way I do and banned all e-mails from 9:30 AM to 12 noon and from 1:30 PM to 4:00 PM, with terrific results. His employees started walking in the hallways again, discussing things face to face... you know, acting like human beings.

Just think of all those empty in-boxes!

Josh

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Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.

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