I'm QUITTING email!

PushSend · Jul 7, 2011

Now who REALLY thinks I'm quitting??? C'mon...you can tell me. Hell, I saw the title of this article and had to read it for myself and after doing so, I can say I've thought about it once or twice. But the reality of it is....I still love it. "I can't quit you email"!

:knuddel:

It started as an idea. Well, a Tweet, really. What if I just stopped responding to email?

Sure, at first it was said in half-jest after a few drinks. It was me channeling my inner Peter Gibbons â€” â€œIâ€™m just gonna stop goingâ€ â€” while Iâ€™m sitting here in Washington D.C. completely buried in email after not getting to it all day. But the motivation behind the Tweet and the idea is very real. Email is the absolute devil. And the only way to not be corrupted is toâ€¦ run away. So thatâ€™s exactly what Iâ€™m going to do.

For the rest of this month, Iâ€™m not going to respond to any emails. None.

Yes, this sounds sort of like a pampered problem and perhaps somewhat of a dick move â€” I should be so lucky to get so many emails, right? But the reality remains: email is an absolute nightmare in my life. I dread it in the morning, I dread it more right before I go to bed. Itâ€™s always in the back of my mind, lingering.

Following my initial Tweets, Colleen Taylor of GigaOm sent me a link to this old post in Emily Magazine that pretty much sums it up:

When people at parties ask me what I do I think I am just going to start saying that Iâ€™m an â€œemailer.â€

Itâ€™s both sad and true.

And Iâ€™m hardly alone. The tweets I sent out on the topic tonight were met with near unanimous agreement (Iâ€™ll paste a some of them below). It seems that most everyone I know wants to quit email. Theyâ€™re just afraid.

The truth is that Iâ€™m afraid too. What happens if I just stop responding? To be honest, Iâ€™m not really sure. I think itâ€™s one of those things where if I thought of all of the potential ramifications, I wouldnâ€™t do it. So Iâ€™m not going to worry about it. Iâ€™m just going to do it.

If nothing else, it will be an interesting experiment. We all talk about our hatred for email â€” and we have for years â€” but few people actually quit. Some try half-heartedly. Others are sure a solution is always just right around the corner. But Iâ€™m done waiting and making excuses. Iâ€™m just going to do it.

Will I have to cheat? I sure hope not. That would be pretty disappointing. But I really donâ€™t think Iâ€™ll have to.

My plan is to still check my inbox from time to time just to make sure that there isnâ€™t some emergency. And Iâ€™ll forward things along as need be (without typing anything beyond an email address). But for everything else, Iâ€™ll simply set up an auto-responder along the lines of â€œNo longer responding to email, if you need me, youâ€™ll figure out a way.â€ (Kudos to Shervin Pishevar who wanted to test a similar idea earlier this year, but I chickened out.)

Thatâ€™s the key to all of this. Itâ€™s not that I really want to blow people off. Itâ€™s that email blows. There has to be a better way. And I think there is! If people really need to get ahold of me, theyâ€™ll know how. There are many options. And all of them are better than email in its current state (come on Gmail Lite, come on!).

That doesnâ€™t mean Iâ€™ll respond to all of these alternative communications either â€” I suspect theyâ€™ll build up quickly too. But at least it will be a nice big barrier to entry that will help to alleviate my inbox overload. And the great thing about some of the other messaging platforms out there is that many of them follow the â€œstreamâ€ idea. That is: when you send a message, maybe there will be a response, maybe there wonâ€™t. With email, a huge problem is that people expect a response every time. With tweets, people donâ€™t.

I donâ€™t know about you, but Iâ€™m excited. I have absolutely no idea what will happen next. Iâ€™ll respond to some of the emails I currently have in my inbox, but then itâ€™s lights out for the rest of July. Will the world end? Will TechCrunch implode? I suspect not. I think that the ultimate result of this experiment will be much less shocking: fewer emails will be sent.
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source: TechCrunch

ndocoder · Jul 7, 2011

He obviously does not have a job.

PushSend · Jul 7, 2011

ndocoder said: ↑

He obviously does not have a job.
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Ha! Well, MG is a very good writer for TechCrunch...interesting that he is trying to quit email but I think it's possible. I mean, if you REALLY want to reach someone for something you can pick up the phone. We all have cell plans with outrageous amounts of minutes or even unlimited...but how often do you find yourself relying on texts or emails from these same "phones"? I'm interested to see how he does with this.

JohnFarrell · Jul 7, 2011

PushSend said: ↑

Ha! Well, MG is a very good writer for TechCrunch...interesting that he is trying to quit email but I think it's possible. I mean, if you REALLY want to reach someone for something you can pick up the phone. We all have cell plans with outrageous amounts of minutes or even unlimited...but how often do you find yourself relying on texts or emails from these same "phones"? I'm interested to see how he does with this.
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Until your boss says "Why haven't you responded to my emails!@# You missed XYZ thing!". It would take everyone at techcrunch quitting email for him to be able to do it successfully.

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