you guys are so bad.
For those of us unwilling to unplug for a vacation, I offer the following:
“I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot. I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully. I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection. I believe that we need to slow down. Communicating more rapidly is not necessary the same as communicating more effectively. We’ve lost the time and the space and the silences to think about who we are, what our values are, what’s important to us and where we’re going, both as individuals and a country as a whole. So my refusal to use e-mail is just a very tiny protest against this onslaught of information and speed. We’re plugged in 24 hours a day now. We’re all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not. And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.”
-Alan Lightman, adjunct professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of books including Einstein’s Dreams and The Diagnosis.
If Melissa’s admitting to mid 30’s, it’s safe to say that I’ve not doubled her age - yet.
Can we send that to our clients, our companies, our bosses, and…?
I have some friends who are already mindless when it comes to emails.
only a tenured professor would say something that silly.
I have a friend who is an administrator at Dartmouth who refused to use email for quite a long time in his career; he had his administrative assistant print out all his emails so he could read them in hard copy. Eventually, he realized that by having someone else print them out, he was wasting her time, and not being very responsive to his colleagues – so he was wasting their time, too. He now uses a blackberry for work, but still doesn’t know how to use email at home.