How Do You Make Email and Texts Steal Less Time?

This is Not About Productivity Hacks

This week I read Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other and Sheila Liming’s Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time. I loved and felt ambivalent about parts of both (much more love for the Liming, much more ambivalence for the Turkle) but reading them together clarified something I’ve been thinking about for awhile: email and texts and app messaging of all kinds are making us increasingly worse at friendship.

In slightly different ways, they’ve tangled the promise of immediacy and ease and mass connection and control (I can have so many group texts! I can get so many work tasks done! I can do a quick check-in on my parents or my kids or my friend! I can respond exactly how I want to when I want to!) and ensnared us in patterns of communication and care that might periodically feel comforting but aren’t actually nourishing. We maintain far larger networks of connection but those connections are far shallower. We substitute a happy birthday text for an actual call or note. We spend so much time texting or emailing that we don’t have time to actually hang out — not as friends, not as co-workers trying to collaborate on something creative. We can’t pay attention in meetings because we’re…..desperately trying to catch up on email. And when we do hang out, we’re distracted by…..TEXTS.

I know all the ways that emails and texts and app messaging are useful. I use them all the time! I also understand the ways they can help sooth certain types of anxiety, and allow us some delicacy and professionalism, and keep ties that we actually want to remain loose and weak in that loose and weak form. I don’t want any of these technologies to disappear. But our attempts to master them — to be the most efficient emailer, the most in touch friend — have allowed them to master us. As I read both Turkle and Liming’s books, I felt an aching sense of loss: I have become a worse friend, a less present person, a worse thinker…..as I’ve used to these tools to try to become better.

I’m going to write more about these ideas at some point, but for today, I want to hear your thoughts on how you’ve attempted to use email, text, or messaging differently. That can be in a way that makes it take up less time, sure, so long as it’s not in the name of productivity, but in order to do the things you actually want to do: like hang out, hobby, whatever. Do you stop an email or text exchange at a point and just give someone a call? Do you insist the group text actually hang out? Do you only check email once a day? I need help, and I know others do too — and maybe we can build some solutions together.

Again: the purpose is not to communicate less. It’s to communicate in different, more present and meaningful and effective ways, ways in which our attention isn’t constantly divided. So what does that look like?