E-mail Overload

Todd Katz hovers between two worlds, one where he is e-mail-obsessed, and the other, where he rejects the modern convenience.

During a recent vacation, Mr. Katz, president of Calusa National Bank in Port Charlotte, drew the ire of his wife when he ducked into a cyber café to log in and check his e-mail. On the flip side, he tries to keep the 200 e-mails he receives each day at a reasonable distance by keeping an old phone that doesn’t pick up the messages.

“My friends make fun of it. It’s a Motorola. It looks like it’s from the mid-90s. We call it a rotary cell,” said Mr. Katz. He refuses to upgrade to a new phone capable of sending and receiving e-mail and instead allots time when he’s in the office in front of his computer to go through messages. The process takes up nearly half of his workday.

About 210 billion pieces of e-mail were sent every second in 2008, according to the Radicati Group, an independent market research firm. The average businessperson gets about 100 e-mails every day. The unending stream of correspondence has increased efficiency but can become a source of stress.

Sometimes, finding peace with your e-mail means finding the right filtering software. Kevin Graham, co-owner of Integrity Risk Management doesn’t mind always being accessible via e-mail, as long as what he’s receiving merits attention. “It’s probably the best way to get ahold of me,” he said.

He goes through about 250 e-mails a day. Another 800 pieces of junk mail or so get stopped and deleted at the electronic filters before reaching his eyes.

“I get so much more done it does make servicing my customers easier, makes it more timely. I can work from anywhere with my phone in my hand.”

The Radicati Group predicts 351 billion spam messages will be sent every day in 2010, but only 190 billion will be delivered because of software that blocks them.

The first e-mail ever sent is commonly traced to a programmer from New York named Raymond Samuel Tomlinson. The content of the e-mail he sent in 1971 was nonsense, a random set of keys tapped for the purposes of a test. However, what that gibberish note started has radically transformed the way many of us communicate and conduct business.

E-mail began catching on with the general population in the mid-1990s, and by the year 2000, about 15 billion messages raced through cyberspace every day, according to research group IDC.

“The first thing I do in the morning is open it (e-mail) up,” said Kip Emory. He pulls double duties as co-owner of Bridges Counseling and Educational Services in Port Charlotte and the chairman of Argosy University’s Psychology program in Sarasota. In order to deal with the 100 or so e-mails he receives daily, he has established a Darwinian hierarchy whereby some e-mails are assured survival and reply while others are destined for the delete bin.

“I quickly go down and scan all the new e-mails. Then, based on priority, like if it’s the vice president of the school as opposed to a professor, guess who gets more priority?” he said.

He admits that sometimes, the mounting list of e-mails in the inbox can become overwhelming. “You see them all and my initial reaction is, ‘How am I going to get to the ones I didn’t do yesterday?” said Mr. Emory. “Then I come to the realization that I don’t walk on water and I can’t do them all.”

There are a few who have taken Mr. Emory’s strategy a step further and decided to just get rid of all their e-mails. E-mail bankruptcy,” happens when overburdened e-mailers purge their inboxes and start fresh. The first to have done it may have been Internet legal visionary Lawrence Lessig who called it quits in 2002.

Others include prominent tech blogger Vanessa Fox (who worked for Google). She was mentioned in a 2007

USA Today article for declaring “bankruptcy.”

“Did the world collapse into a burning inferno of e-mail non-response?” Ms. Fox posted on her blog. “Amazingly enough, life has gone on.”

On the other hand, some business owners, like Jim Nolan Jr. of Nolan Family Insurance in Punta Gorda, are sure not to let one piece of e-mail slip past. His staff spends the half-hour before the doors open checking e-mail. Often, those messages will drive the work of the day, as staff research customer questions or work up quotes.

“As far as servicing the customer, getting policies issued and serviced, it has been a big advantage,” said Mr. Nolan.

Nevertheless, that perpetually filling inbox can sometimes be a nag even to its biggest fans.

“I’m not good at deleting things right away, I want to make sure they’re handled,. so every couple of weeks I spend an hour or two going through and deleting so that I just have 100 e-mails or so in my box,” said Mr. Nolan.

Despite the rise of e-mail use, or perhaps because of it, the value of an oldfashioned hand-written note has never been higher. Banker Todd Katz makes sure to send every new client a personalized written thank you note.

“I try not to make it a rubber stamp note,” said Mr. Katz. “You wouldn’t believe the people who write back to say ‘thank you.’ Nobody writes a note anymore.” 

tips

• Reply to mail right away if possible, especially if you deal with large volumes of mail. If you don’t, you might get swamped by it.

• Pick and choose. Based on the subject line, it’s often easy to discern which e-mails you have to answer, which aren’t so pressing and the ones that are not for you.

• Be discriminating about who you give your address to. Only friends, family and active business associates should get your main e-mail address.

• Focus is key. To maintain it, avoid checking e-mail every five minutes, being on your Blackberry in traffic or waking in the night to check it.

• Send fewer e-mails. If you send 20 percent less, chances are you’ll get 20 percent less.

• Walk away, if necessary. Some say e-mail bankruptcy, or deleting all your unread messages, was the only way to catch up. Make yourself available in other ways, by phone or in person.

• Set up separate e-mail accounts. (Although many say having too many e-mail addresses can cause e-mail bankruptcy). One blogger said he had an “events@” e-mail address used only for concert notifications and art gallery openings.