I Freed Myself From E-Mail's Grip

News Type: Opinion — Seeded on Mon Jun 30, 2008 11:03 AM EDT

Article Source: The New York Times

technology

Seeded by Scott (Scoop) Butki

I can totally relate to this guy. Can you?

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Scott (Scoop) Butki's Column, All of Newsvine
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Regions: New York

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{"commentId":2085362,"authorDomain":"sbutki"}

Scott (Scoop) Butki

EARLIER this year, I became tired of my usual morning ritual of spending hours catching up on e-mail. So I did something drastic to take back control of my productivity.

stopped using e-mail most of the time. I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return. It becomes a vicious cycle. By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of e-mails that I receive by 80 percent in a single week.

It's not that I stopped communicating; I just communicated in different and more productive ways. Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others. I also started to use the telephone much more than I did before, which has the added advantage of being a more personal form of interaction.

{"commentId":2085362,"threadId":"302561","contentId":"1625402","authorDomain":"sbutki"}

#1 - Mon Jun 30, 2008 11:04 AM EDT

{"commentId":2086636,"authorDomain":"divbyzero"}

Division by Zero

One of my coworkers recently took a 9-day vacation. Despite having personally told all of the clients that he handles that he was going on vacation and despite his out-of-office notification stating that he was on vacation and when he would return to the office, he still had over 600 emails to contend with upon his return. A week later he still hasn't dealt with all of them and has received hundreds more on top of that. It just seems to me that if you can't take a vacation with your family without paying a heavy price for it, what's the point of even trying?

{"commentId":2086636,"threadId":"302561","contentId":"1625402","authorDomain":"divbyzero"}

1 vote

#2 - Mon Jun 30, 2008 1:27 PM EDT

{"commentId":2095447,"authorDomain":"sbutki"}

Scott (Scoop) Butki

600? That's insane!

I've read a few good stories about people who just gave up email completely and told everyone they knew if they needed them to call. They went totally cold turkey.

{"commentId":2095447,"threadId":"302561","contentId":"1625402","authorDomain":"sbutki"}

#2.1 - Tue Jul 1, 2008 2:06 PM EDT

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SCOTT (SCOOP) BUTKI

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I Freed Myself From E-Mail's Grip

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