Tiny Time Rant Tuesday: The Problem With E-Mail

TL/DR It's not you. E-mail has gone insane.

Today on Tiny Time Rant Tuesday, we tackle the thorny problem of email.

Before we dive in to the subject at hand, we provide a brief overview of why we rant about time and what we hope to accomplish by doing so.

Don’t want to read the whole rant? Watch the video version!

Welcome To Tiny Time Rant Tuesday

In some parts of the world it is Tuesday (or it will be again some day) and that means that it is Tiny Time Rant Tuesday.

Why A Rant?

Tiny Time Rant Tuesday is where we tackle typical temporal traps that complicate our experience of time. We recognize that we live in a ranty world. Sometimes ranting can just amplify a problem, compound the frustration, and not offer any solutions. We don’t want to contribute to the noise, we want to help people find the signal. This is where Tiny Time Rant Tuesday is different.

We rant to get it all out. We rant so that we can better figure out how to address it. We rant to better understand why something is a problem. We rant because we want others to understand and connect to our frustration. We rant to be heard. We rant to remind ourselves that we are not alone.  We rant to transform the energy of frustration to the energy of imagination. Maybe we could call this process “rantsformation”.

Rant+Transformation = Rantsformation?

And this is where Time Re-Imaginement Tool Thursday comes in. Once we have identified the problem and named why it is so…problematic, we retreat to the time cave of solutions and, in the fire of our imagination, forge a handy tool or method to help us experiment with possible solutions.

Below we see one of our soon-to-be-world famous post-rant space rabbits.

Here are eleven reasons why e-mail feels like such a problem:

1. E-mail has been around for a long time. Since the first electronic message was sent across computers in the early 1970s, e-mail connected billions of people around the globe and has also become an essential part of everyday personal and professional life (Statista.com). It’s hard to believe that e-mail has been with us for over fifty years.
2. E-mail is everywhere. We have even sent e-mails from space. In 1991 the crew of the Atlantis space shuttle wrote, “Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first AppleLink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here,…send cryo and RCS! Hasta la vista, baby,…we’ll be back!” (E-mailonacid.com). No wonder why you feel like you can’t get away from your inbox.
3. So many people have it. In 2020, the number of global e-mail users amounted to about four billion users. That number is predicted to grow to 4.6 billion users in 2025. (Radicati.com). So know this: whatever your issue or challenge is with e-mail it is highly unlikely that you are the only one.
4. We send A LOT of e-mail. In the US users in the US send 9.8 billion e-mails per day. Yes, 9.8 billion. Overall, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan, India, and Germany each had 8.3 billion e-mails sent per day (www.statstica.com). So when you think about your unread messages, in the grand scheme of things they are only a tiiiiinnny percentage of that number.
5. We are ALWAYS e-mailing. In case you were wondering how that might break down to e-mails by minute, according to one recent tabulation, over 231 million e-mails were sent worldwide within one minute (www.statistica.com). So while you were reading this, it's likely that at least 231 million more e-mails made their way into the world, hopefully not all of them into your inbox.
6. All that e-mail takes A LOT of our time. In 2021, users in the United States spent approximately 172 minutes DAILY checking their personal e-mails, compared to around 149 minutes daily spent checking their work e-mails. That’s 321 combined minutes a day or over 5.5 HOURS (statistia.com) a day.  Is it just me or is this kind of horrifying?
7. A LOT of time. This means that, this year, you could spend 1,358 total hours on e-mail (counting only US workdays). If you consider ONLY work e-mail, and only working days that is 36,803 minutes or almost 26 days (assuming you didn’t need to sleep or eat or such things). If you want to deal with email during the workday, that would be 87 work days (based on a seven hour day). This would make May 8, 2023 FINALLY FREE FROM E-MAIL DAY. Then there is the time checking e-mail. One recent study showed that the average worker at a large company checked their e-mail 77 times a day (World Without E-Mail). Moments like this are when I need an in-office fainting couch.
8. E-mail stresses us out. The “cost of the ubiquity of e-mail in the workplace” is well-documented. These costs include: cognitive overload, a lack of clarity with e-mail requests, the work being demanded in the e-mails, a loss of control, interruptions due to e-mails, social pressure to respond quickly, it often imposes more costs on the receiver rather than the sender, and the list goes on (Microsoft Research).
9. E-mail is timeless. We are time bound. The amount of e-mail we contend with has the possibility to expand infinitely wheres the time that we have to respond will not change. E-mail is de-temporalized but we are not. Baring inbox limits and whatnot, e-mail can theoretically hang out indefinitely until we find the time to open it or delete it. Fun fact: the record for the must unread e-mails is claimed by Joey Manansala who reports that he has over 4,294,967,256 unread e-mails in his inbox. If Joey were able to deal with each of those e-mails in a minute or less, he would be able to crank through his inbox in a mere 298,261 days, 14 hours, 45 minutes. I have nowhere near that number but when I did the math for my own inbox disaster I am looking at weeks of my life spent digging out, if I wanted to do that.
10. The e-mail paradox. Which brings us to the fundamental e-mail paradox: while the volume of potential correspondence constantly increases, the time we are allowed each day does not. Have your deletion party, tag, flag, categorize, organize or do whatever it is you do to manage but it wont magically create a timeless void where there is time to answer every message. Besides while you are diligently answering messages more keep coming.
11. E-mail is but one of many channels of communication. And to further complicate matters, e-mail is but one means of communication.  We also have social media, messaging apps, virtual meetings, commenting, and communities. We have the the endless plume of content constantly being shared. To put this in perspective, according to the Data Never Sleeps Infographic (as horrifying as it is fascinating ) in 2022, during one internet minute, one million hours of content were streamed by users worldwide. And now, on top of that we have the torrent of AI generated information being unleashed into the world. It's all enough to cause one to run screaming anytime back to the analog world.

The Impossibility of Inbox Zero

And you wonder why you can’t get to inbox zero. You are not alone. According to a recent study, only 46% if respondents actually achieved inbox zero. In reality, achieving inbox zero in itself is only a temporary achievement. It brings to mind this quote from Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals:

"Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster (p. 13)."

See, its Not Just You, E-Mail Has Gone Insane

 To be clear, the intention with this is not to say that e-mail is categorically bad and should be abolished (although Cal Newport does create a compelling, if not unrealistic for most, case for this in World Without E-mail).

Rather, as the above stats suggest, e-mail is very much woven into our workday/life day and few of us have the ability (or arguably desire) to cut out e-mail entirely.

Sure, in the future, there will likely be a day where there are virtual versions of ourselves are toiling away at all hours, closing every open loop only to have it open again. AI generated responses will likely become more of the norm (and that poses its own set of problems and challenges).

But… for now… we each have only 24 hours a day and e-mail is but one of the things we need to do in that allotment of time.

The Time Re-Imaginement Question

So then the question is then what to do? If e-mail is going to be woven into our daily lives, how do we artfully do that? How do we engage with our inbox in a way that doesn’t make us just start ululating as a default anytime we open our inbox?

Coming Next: Time Re-Imaginement Tool

 We will address that in the next installment of this series with our newest Time Re-imaginement Tool: Using the E.M.A.I.L. Mindset Method to Tame Inbox Anxiety (E-Engage, M-Meaningfully, A-And, I-Intentionally for, L-Lasting Results).

The free workshop will take place on LinkedIn Live on Thursday, April 13 at 11:00 AM CT (UTC-6)