KEY POINTS:
It's no good. I can't live with the guilt anymore. It's time to come clean about those emails, and ask for forgiveness.
Well, it's almost Christmas and as if the obligatory parties and shopping aren't bad enough, I'm feeling the added pressure of trying to finish off all the jobs that have lain around like indolent teenagers all year, inducing brief spells of guilt but not much action.
Like answering all those emails that reproach me whenever I open my inbox.
I love getting emails. I do. It's replying to them that's problematic. This is why my "drafts" folder is filled with partial answers going back nearly two years. And why I'm declaring email bankruptcy.
Stanford University technology professor and copyright law expert Lawrence Lessig started it by publicly declaring email bankruptcy in 2004. After spending 80 hours one week trying to get through emails that had built up since January 2002, he realised it was a lost cause. He could answer his emails, or he could do his job, but not both.
Which, incidentally, has been my experience.
Lessig sent out a mass email: "Dear person who sent me a yet-unanswered email. I apologise, but I am declaring email bankruptcy."
Apologising profusely for his lack of "cyber decency", Lessig asked his email creditors to resend any important messages, and he'd try to make good his debt.
Since then, other high profile-figures have joined him, including several university professors, and recording artist Moby, who reportedly sent an email to all his contacts announcing he was taking a break from email for the rest of the year.
Last year, American venture capitalist Fred Wilson also announced he was giving up: "I am so far behind on email that I am declaring bankruptcy," he wrote. "If you've sent me an email (and you aren't my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again. I am starting over."
Some people have sworn off email altogether. Stanford computer science professor Donald E. Knuth, who started using email in 1975 and stopped 15 years later, told the Washington Post he had no regrets about giving up email. He got more books written without the constant distraction.
"I'd get to work and start answering email.Three hours later, I'd say, 'Oh, what was I supposed to do today?"'
I was at a birthday party not long ago and someone told me how much he'd liked a piece I'd written a couple of years before. "I sent you an email," he said, and I caught the slightest hint of reproach. I hadn't replied; worse, I hadn't even seen it, and I would have remembered in his case. I asked him to send it again. It was a beautiful, moving note that I wish I'd read at the time.
That time, I had a good excuse. I'd changed my internet service provider and my email address, but unbeknownst to me the online Herald continued to carry the old address for the better part of a year.
It was mixed blessing. I was freed of the obligation to reply, but I had no idea who, if anyone, was reading, which was a little disconcerting. Like finding out that important emails may have ended up in my spam folder, where they're buried under all the ads for penis-enhancing drugs, and routinely trashed.
Someone suggested I get around the backlog by sending automatic responses, but I've never liked that idea. Most emails require a considered and personal response. I want to tell the silly ones that they should go away but that seems un-Christian, so I don't.
Some want me to help fix their problems. A couple who've been looking after their young niece sent me the file of their dealings with CYFS. She'd been neglected and abused by her mother, they say, and was just starting to make progress when her mother wanted her back. I've spent hours reading about their fight to keep her safe and still haven't got to the bottom of it. I doubt I ever will.
Some are like the Epsom Girls student who wanted me to tell her why she should feel proud to be Polynesian. I thought it was obvious but I didn't want to risk giving her the wrong message, so I told her I'd get back to her, and when I did, five months later, she replied immediately. She'd checked her inbox every day, she told me. Her friends had laughed at her, but she knew I was busy. Which made me feel worse.
Still others ask the kind of questions demanding dissertations which would be too long for columns, let alone emails. But I'm saving those for the book I'll have time to write, once I've been forgiven my email debt.
