Quotes About Email

Constant communication is not something that gets in the way of real work; it has instead become totally intertwined in how this work actually gets done—preventing easy efforts to reduce distractions through better habits or short-lived management stunts like email-free Fridays.

What's the impact of our current e-mail habits on the bottom line?

We instead find ourselves in distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings are incessant—a setting where colleagues would rather you respond quickly to their latest e-mail than produce the best possible results.

2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker's time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone.

This includes, crucially, checking e-mail, as well as browsing work-related websites. In both cases, even a brief intrusion of work can generate a self-reinforcing stream of distraction that impedes the shutdown advantages described earlier for a long time to follow (most people are familiar, for example, with the experience of glancing at an alarming e-mail on a Saturday morning and then having its implications haunt your thoughts for the rest of the weekend).

In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality.

the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker's time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone.

In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers,

These e-mails take the sender only a handful of seconds to write but can command many minutes (if not hours, in some cases) of time and attention from their recipients to work toward a coherent response. A little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the overall time spent by all parties by a significant fraction

In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.

Depth-destroying behaviors such as immediate e-mail responses and an active social media presence are lauded, while avoidance of these trends generates suspicion.

If e-mail were to move to the periphery of your workday, you'd be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how long. This type of planning is hard. Consider, for example, David Allen's Getting Things Done task-management methodology, which is a well-respected system for intelligently managing competing workplace obligations.

Turning her attention to the workplace, Turkle finds young employees who retreat to email because the thought of an unstructured conversation terrifies them, and unnecessary office tensions that fester when communication shifts from nuanced conversation to ambiguous connection.

If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time … there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.

the technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are underdeveloped.

During these periods, which can last up to three or four days, he'll often put an out-of-office auto-responder on his e-mail so correspondents will know not to expect a response. "It sometimes confuses my colleagues," he told me. "They say, 'You're not out of office, I see you in your office right now!'" But to Grant, it's important to enforce strict isolation until he completes the task at hand.

But then one time, you track down an email address and you're near a computer with Internet access so you don't have that nice cushion and you type what you're feeling and press send before you have a chance to talk yourself out of it. And then you wait, and wait, and wait, and nothing comes back, so all those things you thought were so important to say, really, they weren't. They weren't worth saying at all.

We note that the Library has not had fire alarm drills for the last two hundred years. This is because we found the two default responses unhelpful. These being "running away screaming" or "resigning yourself to death while clutching your favourite books." Librarians with more useful suggestions should contact Yves via email and attach a full benefit-threat analysis.

It sounds so nerdy and pathetic, but what I always do on Sunday afternoon is bring my inbox down to zero, which is so sad. But e-mail has become like homework for adults. I'll have 141 messages from people who will be offended if I don't write back.

On Friday, October 28, 2016, the FBI disclosed that they were reopening Clinton's email probe, and the same day, gold hit $1280/oz. Conversely, oil dropped by $1.33 to $45.34 per barrel, while stock prices also took a tumble.

We have a great NASA support team that uplinks the nightly news. And if we have favorite TV shows or movies or sporting events, they can uplink those too. We also have access to the Internet just like we would on the ground. We have email. And we video-conference with our families about once a week. We feel pretty connected up here.

I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I've opened email accounts, twice actually, but it's something I don't want in my life right now.

I wish everyone was a sci-fi geek because then there would be no violence in the world. There'd be no wars. There'd only be people e-mailing each other.

Respondents had been so overwhelmed by their in-box they'd declared "e-mail bankruptcy.