Counterproductive Email Triage

I finally took the time to write a long-delayed email response to my friend Mary yesterday. After drifting out of communication over the past couple years, I had received several emails of support and encouragement from Mary during the last month or so. It was great to hear from her although I was saddened to learn that her husband is also battling lymphoma. In the course of 'making excuses' for my untimely reply it occurred to me that I've developed a very bad 'email triage' habit lately. As I told Mary, I first "trash 95% of it, make quick responses to those urgent but unimportant messages that demand my immediate attention, then save those important but less urgent messages until I have time to make a more thoughtful and coherent reply." Unfortunately, it seems that time is always in woefully short supply. As a result, I now have almost two dozen 'important' messages that have gone far too long without a response! Some system. I am reminded of Steven Covey's (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) advice that we should put our energy into things that are important but not urgent (rather than waiting for important to become urgent, giving our energy to the urgent but unimportant, or frittering away hours on the unimportant and non-urgent).

The irony of our capacity for instant communication delaying (and trivializing?) responses has been put in especially sharp relief for me lately because I have been reading reams of Darwin's correspondence from the 1860s as part of an on-going collaboration with a couple BSU colleagues. Most of the letters aren't especially long but they are numerous, timely, and always sharply focused. It sometimes seems that the convenience of instant messaging and email (not to mention telephones and I suppose even the telegraph!) has fragmented my (our culture's?) writing (and I suspect my/our thinking as well). The dangers of historical scholarship...I fear I am rapidly becoming a conflicted, techno-savvy Luddite. /dps