email

I have failed… no question about it; two weeks gone by and no update; yet another resolution who did not stand up the test of time; but never mind, such is life; one simply has to recognize failure, concede the battle and keep trying, imagining a future victorious conclusion to the current war waged… (I am not actually taking myself that seriously, I just get carried away writing non-scientifically structured prose:-)

In that spirit, I decided to talk today about email.

I am going on a short vacation for a week and I am debating wether I should have access to email. It is interesting to note that this is a rare case of us taking a vacation that is not in our usual summer retreat to the old world and it is not associated with work-related travel (conference, meeting, …). There is no other motivation (see family, meet for a project) for this vacation except that to take a break as a family. This makes it feel quite decadent and self-indulgent, and terribly exciting. And somehow it brings to the foreground the question of email: there is no question about these other vacations: work-related travel implies the umbilical cord to the office email and work and so does the long vacation back in the old country (we would not be able to “afford” such long vacations if we were cutoff from the office). So here is this new “vacation-vacation exotic bird” which makes it seem possible, even required, that I should actually not have access to my office email. There is nothing much that can go terribly wrong in a week (especially when it is Reading Week), and I have been rather good at answering my email so nothing timely is pending (why do you think I have not been blogging?) and, worse comes to worst, people have my phone number so if anything terribly timely was pending someone would call me. So why am I thinking about it?

The funny thing is that I didn’t until a colleague mentioned to me in passing that I know you will not be able to do much about things since you will be away but you will be on email so you will know about everything, which made me think that

• his expectation was indeed reasonable — this has been my mondus operandi for ever, so he can safely make this assumption; and
• I did not want him to be right — why should I be aware of every small emergency and temporary tragedy and storm in a teapot back in the office when I could not actually be expected to respond to it?
  

So I started thinking about the possibility of not accessing email during my weekly vacation; and then I considered that I did not actually have to bring a laptop with me at all, so that I would not actually read/mark papers or edit proposals or work on my class or FB/twitter or blog.

And the novelty of this possibility just struck me!

And then I thought about my relationship with email has evolved over time:

I used to respond to email messages after I had made some progress towards the objective that the message was about, since more messages would usually be about some “todo”. Now I have a lot of messages that I skim and ignore; with filters much of this categorization can be done automatically. For the messages that I have to respond to, I usually generate a draft response which I conceptually equate with a “todo” and then file away. Many of them I try to pass on to other people who may be able to act on them (something like a hot-potato game…). For the ones I have to keep on my plate I make deadlines by when I must make some progress and I have developed a scheme (not explicit yet) for how behind I will allow myself to be on each particular task. Thus a good metric of how busy I am is the sum of messages in my Inbox and Drafts mail folders, plus some function of the pending todos in my task list (and how late/urgent they are).

So this is a perfect opportunity to validate my metric!

1. First a question of understanding the range of the metric values: I have been controlling this number to be ~20; this is my comfort zone, developed primarily based on my obsession to respond to my mail’s UI; but how bad would it become in a week if I did not control it on a daily basis? I am estimating ~500 messages
2. Second a question of validation: how bad is a big number? I have been operating under the assumption that 20-30 is OK and beyond that it is not. But when I see the big number after I come back, I am guessing that I may find that 500 can easily be brought down to 40 which would mean that 500 is not that bad after all.
3. This is more of a psychometric (I think this is the right word in this context but I am not sure) assessment: how will I feel when I see that big number of messages? stressed? worried? panicked? overwhelmed?

We are back! It was a wonderful vacation and I could seriously increase my word count if I were to report on what we did during this past week. But I will restrict myself to my original plan: I will only report on my reaction to my mailbox after I left it completely unattended for 8 days.

First let me just repeat it for the record: I did not read email for 8 days. I was tempted, I must admit; my husband had his laptop with him and his blackberry, and he was checking his messages. My daughter had her ipod and she did avail herself of free Internet towards the end of our trip at least. I used my husband’s laptop to find routes using googlemaps. So it is not lack of means that kept me true to my promise; it is simply my monumental strength of character:-) I am honestly quite proud of myself!

Now let me answer the three questions I set for myself before leaving.

I was really stressed when I switched on my laptop. I had visions of expired deadlines, funding agencies complaining, colleagues upset at my delinquency, students idling in mid-step waiting for me to tell them what next, children’s schools notifying me of piles of homework… I was truly scared.

I found out that I had 470 messages, which establishes the fact that I have a good grasp on my mail-traffic reality.

I worked through the day and reviewed everything.

I found out that

1. Today was the hard deadline for a short document due for publication; this was a duty that a colleague of mine was supposed to have completed but we are both responsible for it, so if I had been looking at my email, I would have done (or at least have felt obliged to do) it.
2. I had missed an opportunity to apply for some small funding to offset costs of undergraduate research assistants during the summer
3. Some actions were due soon-ish for a student to be paid and an account report to be generated and the account to be extended (all was done today).
4. Several submission notifications had come in; a mix of good news – bad news (what’s new?)
5. My students had taken care of several todos that, had I been checking email, I would have advised them on; it turns out, that would have not been necessary.
6. A colleague had taken care of a couple of conference-organization tasks for which we were co-responsible; I owe him some extra work in the future.
7. I had received a couple of todos from a committee of which I am a member; I took care of them today.
8. A bunch of meetings had been setup in my absence; I had to reschedule things in my calendar and a real problem has occurred due to the shifting which will have to be somehow addressed.
9. I got a reminder about a presentation I am supposed to give on Wednesday; I am sort of prepared for it and had I been reading email, I would have likely finished it off during the weekend; now I will have to squeeze some late-evening time tonight or tomorrow evening for it.
10. As I was working through my email, a really nice email came from a colleague complimenting me on my ABI profile; it was really heartwarming!
11. I got in touch with the colleague who, unwittingly, challenged me to not read email and we will meet on Friday to catch up with whatever has come up in the mean time; I am also meeting my assistant tomorrow in preparation for my Friday meeting.
12. A new proposal opportunity has arisen that matches some ideas that I have already been exploring with another group of colleagues and I need to work on it.
13. Some emergency work is needed on a collaborative proposal with which I am involved for the past year. A skype meeting has been setup for tomorrow at 6am.
14. Two more reviewing deadlines have been added to my list of todos.

In summary, I am a bit exposed with the potential of missing the hard deadline for the short publication but it is not a tragedy. Neither is the missed funding opportunity. Nothing terrible, not even really bad, has happened. I am relieved and, to my embarrassment, I must admit that I am a touch surprised also: I was really fearing that my weeklong absence might have some more important consequences, thus implicitly validating my practice of responding so fast. It turns out that a week-long delay is not long. Who knew?

Finally, I can proudly report that my 470 mailbox of this morning is tamed to ~45 (drafts and inbox messages) which shows that 45 is a good number but not that far away from 470; only about a day’s work. How’s that for calibration?

In the end, I am terribly happy I stayed out of email. I had an amazingly relaxing vacation, I read a couple of books, I had some memorably inane conversations with both my children and my mailbox is not threatening any more this evening. And, maybe, I may start a yet a different type of relationship with email, where I do not respond immediately, I let things sit for a week. It looks like mail does not go bad in a week…