This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. This week, my partner and co-author, Charlie Warzel, is taking over to write about part of our research for our forthcoming book on the promise/peril of working from home.
Since leaving my old job the role of email in my "working" life has been drastically reduced. And since I regained a work email, albeit for a part-time job, especially since COVID, I hardly get anything that isn't spam because most of what I was getting was from authors and publicists trying to schedule events. And events don't happen anymore!
I have five fucking email addresses, though. I have the one I call my Bullshit account. It's one that I use for logins, online purchases, etc. I check it a couple times a day and interaction is generally under a minute because it's almost always a select all/delete process after a quick skim. Email #2 was my primary personal email before gmail that is now a secondary Bullshit account only it has my PayPal account attached to it. That email is generally a select all/delete interaction as well. #3 is my gmail account. I generally don't use it but it's for all the google-attached bullshit I can't shed myself of, and for newsletters I actually care to read (like this one!). #4 is the aforementioned work one. I'm really only obligated to interact with it three days/week and the content generally isn't odious and it doesn't bother me. And #5 is my actual personal email that I use for my writing "career" (*laughs, chokes, starts crying*) and I wish I would get MORE email there, primarily of the huge advance offer/massively-compensated speaking engagements, etc. variety. I know this paragraph isn't relevant to the conversation but I'm sure juggling multiple addresses is part of most people's email experience.
I actually prefer email to texting. Texting across multiple apps and stuff makes me crazy, and the expectation of immediate response is higher there and it makes me crazy. Still, I'd rather text than talk on the fucking phone.
Final beef: email programs trying to do all of our thinking for us. Grouping by subject, sender, all of that bullshit. LET ME HANDLE MY OWN SHIT, THANK YOU VERY MUCH! That makes me most insane. I hate computers trying to think for us because I'm old, I've been doing this shit for decades, and I have ways that work for me that are constantly being fucked with.
Sorry for the language, friends. But I figure if there is any safe space for f-bombs on the internet, it's here in the Culture Study, damn it.
I was really looking forward to this piece and am so glad to have read it! Really looking forward to more, as I think that we've only barely scratched the surface with rethinking how "work" works. For example, what's with the 8-hour workday? We (most of us, anyway) don't work on assembly lines and there's a common feeling among my professor friends especially that we are only really capable of 3 hours of work (= three hours' sustained concentration, max) in a given day. Back when I had a long commute, I felt like getting to the office and interacting with my colleagues was a big part (not that I miss it) of how I used up the extra time. But now that so many of us are at home, what's to replace it? How guilty should we feel about those 5 less actively working hours? I get the sense that constantly checking email is a way that many of us deal with the guilt that comes from not quite having enough to do to fill up the time that we have agreed we owe our employers, but perhaps we should just call a spade a spade and devote a bigger chunk of our days to other life-enhancing and life-extending pursuits: hobbies, exercise, big writing projects, bolder kitchen experiments, what-have-you. Instead of surreptitiously checking our social feeds, email among them.
As a matter of fact, I choose email to texting. Texting across several applications and other things drives me nuts, and the expectation of a fast answer is stronger there, which drives me crazy even more for the same reason. https://clusterrush.io Despite this, I would much sooner send a text than converse on the dumb phone.
In my old job, I spent about five years working with lawyers and legal assistants on how and why administrative support has become so difficult. I'll never forgot a legal assistant, who was hired in the early 1980s, telling me that as soon as email became a thing, it was like her brain was turned off. Because she didn't see all of the lawyers' incoming correspondence or play a role in their outgoing correspondence, she felt she didn't have meaningful work to do anymore.
Since leaving my old job the role of email in my "working" life has been drastically reduced. And since I regained a work email, albeit for a part-time job, especially since COVID, I hardly get anything that isn't spam because most of what I was getting was from authors and publicists trying to schedule events. And events don't happen anymore!
I have five fucking email addresses, though. I have the one I call my Bullshit account. It's one that I use for logins, online purchases, etc. I check it a couple times a day and interaction is generally under a minute because it's almost always a select all/delete process after a quick skim. Email #2 was my primary personal email before gmail that is now a secondary Bullshit account only it has my PayPal account attached to it. That email is generally a select all/delete interaction as well. #3 is my gmail account. I generally don't use it but it's for all the google-attached bullshit I can't shed myself of, and for newsletters I actually care to read (like this one!). #4 is the aforementioned work one. I'm really only obligated to interact with it three days/week and the content generally isn't odious and it doesn't bother me. And #5 is my actual personal email that I use for my writing "career" (*laughs, chokes, starts crying*) and I wish I would get MORE email there, primarily of the huge advance offer/massively-compensated speaking engagements, etc. variety. I know this paragraph isn't relevant to the conversation but I'm sure juggling multiple addresses is part of most people's email experience.
I actually prefer email to texting. Texting across multiple apps and stuff makes me crazy, and the expectation of immediate response is higher there and it makes me crazy. Still, I'd rather text than talk on the fucking phone.
Final beef: email programs trying to do all of our thinking for us. Grouping by subject, sender, all of that bullshit. LET ME HANDLE MY OWN SHIT, THANK YOU VERY MUCH! That makes me most insane. I hate computers trying to think for us because I'm old, I've been doing this shit for decades, and I have ways that work for me that are constantly being fucked with.
Sorry for the language, friends. But I figure if there is any safe space for f-bombs on the internet, it's here in the Culture Study, damn it.
I was really looking forward to this piece and am so glad to have read it! Really looking forward to more, as I think that we've only barely scratched the surface with rethinking how "work" works. For example, what's with the 8-hour workday? We (most of us, anyway) don't work on assembly lines and there's a common feeling among my professor friends especially that we are only really capable of 3 hours of work (= three hours' sustained concentration, max) in a given day. Back when I had a long commute, I felt like getting to the office and interacting with my colleagues was a big part (not that I miss it) of how I used up the extra time. But now that so many of us are at home, what's to replace it? How guilty should we feel about those 5 less actively working hours? I get the sense that constantly checking email is a way that many of us deal with the guilt that comes from not quite having enough to do to fill up the time that we have agreed we owe our employers, but perhaps we should just call a spade a spade and devote a bigger chunk of our days to other life-enhancing and life-extending pursuits: hobbies, exercise, big writing projects, bolder kitchen experiments, what-have-you. Instead of surreptitiously checking our social feeds, email among them.
As a matter of fact, I choose email to texting. Texting across several applications and other things drives me nuts, and the expectation of a fast answer is stronger there, which drives me crazy even more for the same reason. https://clusterrush.io Despite this, I would much sooner send a text than converse on the dumb phone.
In my old job, I spent about five years working with lawyers and legal assistants on how and why administrative support has become so difficult. I'll never forgot a legal assistant, who was hired in the early 1980s, telling me that as soon as email became a thing, it was like her brain was turned off. Because she didn't see all of the lawyers' incoming correspondence or play a role in their outgoing correspondence, she felt she didn't have meaningful work to do anymore.