The Tribune

By DIANE PHILLIPS

I have 59,775 e-mails in my inbox, 5,532 unread, and I am not even an important person. Oops, make that 59,776 and climbing. Most of them are business-related, some are general – what’s on at an art gallery next month, entertainment line-up at a resort – and every now and then, a personal note slips through. It might be an invitation to an event or to lunch or just to take the place of the days when we used to pass each other on the street and stop to chat, a kind of hail ya’ without being bothered to pick up the phone and take real time to say hello.

Half the time I am grateful for e-mail, like when I finish a column and send it off in a split second to the editor. In the old days, I used to print it, drive it to a building, walk it up the stairs, hand it to someone who had to type it in. Just thinking about it makes me wonder how newspapers ever got printed.

But the other half of the time I long for the days before I was wired to my inbox. What did I do with all that spare time before email all but ran my life? Now if I turn my back on my inbox, I am riddled with guilt. So I stay tuned. And it’s not like you get a warning anymore like you did in the beginning that says, ‘You’ve got mail.’ No, you just have to be on the trail, ready to read, hit reply or reply all, figure out if there is someone else to add, determine if a thread should be forwarded or deleted before sending, but always like a football player in the huddle when the ball is about to be tossed, on high alert, afraid to ignore something important that might land, requiring immediate attention or scuttling an opportunity because you missed by a deadline you forgot to notice.

We are so dependent on email that it has changed us from a society of folks who want to talk with each other to a culture of strangers who feel compelled to converse. We’ve become an army of e-speakers ready to march, to hit that reply key and continue what someone else started.

Average person 121 emails a day

The good – or bad – news is that it is only going to get better, or worse. The number of emails flying across however they fly grows by a few percent every year. Think back to 1976 when Queen Elizabeth became the first head of state to send an electronic message. That was just five years after computer engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first test message from a lab in Massachusetts in 1971. The queen’s act was so bold, so modern it made headlines – an electronic message.

In 2023, it was reported that people across the globe sent 347.3 billion emails. No telling how many were spam or junk. No telling how many were teasers that set you off dreaming for just a moment fantasizing about a trip to Tahiti before you took your eyes off the scenery and hit delete and unsubscribe.

McKinsey, usually a very reliable source, says the average professional spends 28 percent of his or her time handling emails. That’s 2.6 hours per workday or more than a full day of the week at the end of a week’s time. Maybe it is essential.

I’m not suggesting that we go back to the age of driving messages across town or failing to communicate instantly with those across the globe. I’m certainly not advocating a return to the days of the fax machine, though some doctors’ offices still use them (shudder). But I am begging for a balance, a way to slip away from the grip of the inbox which follows me everywhere I go, on my desktop, my laptop, my phone. Sorry, gotta go, it’s a Whatsapp I have to answer.