Finally caught up!

Praise the Lord!!! I’m finally caught up on e-mails from my Summer o’ Fun. And by caught up, I mean that my inbox is now empty… because I moved everything to other folders. =P So technically, I still have a couple hundred e-mails that need relatively immediate attention. But at least they’ve been categorized!!

Oh, and that’s just for my work account. School is, as always, insanely behind, and I don’t see how I’m going to catch up. E-mail sometimes sucks… it lures you in with the promise of interesting readings and conversations, and then traps you into thinking you have to read everything that comes to you. I’m starting to learn that I can just delete shit that I don’t have time for… but I still feel guilty about it. There was an article on salon.com a few months ago arguing that we’re not actually socially obligated to read every e-mail, or to even keep our inboxes clear. I need to go read that article to see if it can help me justify myself.

Isn’t it weird how like 15 yrs ago no one on the planet had e-mail, but now it’s this big deal if you don’t respond to someone’s message within 24 hrs? Same with phone calls and text messages, though on a different timescale for each. Most of these methods of communications don’t have any cost associated with sending them (save the execution time), and almost always require more time and resources for the receiver to reply. I think we need to devise a system that disincents people from sending messages. That would help throttle back the traffic on the internet (porn spams!) and in my inbox, specifically. Like a slight cost per e-mail sent.

Actually, there’s a start-up I’ve heard of that’s created a sort of e-mail-based currency. When sending a message that’s important to you, you attach some currency to it as an incentive for the receiver to respond (and as an indicator of its relative importance to you). Each person on the system is only allocated a set amount of currency per month, so you can’t over-use it. I like the idea of that… it would really help me prioritize my responses if I could sort based on relative importance to the sender.

This post would fall under the “nonsensitudes” category. Or ramblings, if I were to update the name of my blog.