Yup, email is a distracting compulsion. And make no mistake, it is just that.
For my sanity, I have email notifications turned off on my phone, so I only get new messages when I explicitly open the app (which I still find I do much too often). Definitely helps.
Not sure I follow. I don't take time off to "check" my email. When I get an email, I get a notification. I open it up, respond, and get back to what I was doing. Where's the time lost in this?
Not sure if you can actually be "100%" productive in that full work day -- but it certainly is more effective to do your work efficiently, and then go home and have proper time off, doing the same amount of work in less time. Six hour work days doesn't seem so bad if you're average worker is only working five hours out of an eight hour day anyway.
You will lose up to 24 minutes of full productivity, according to several different pieces of research. For example: "A study by Microsoft researchers tracking the email habits of co-workers found that once their work had been interrupted by an email notification, people took, on average, 24 minutes to return to the suspended task" [1].
The issue is the cognitive load introduced by task switching. You may not realize it on the surface, but breaking away each time to write a reply (or even to a lesser extent just the mere fact that you are now notified there's a message waiting) is causing a huge distraction for your brain, and slowing down your "real" work.
[1] Paul Hemp. 2009. "Death by information overload," Harvard Business Review 87(9).
If you get interrupted a lot it helps to take notes on a pad, kind of use it as your "stack" and just list out what you're doing so when you're done you can go back to that frame of mind more easily.
Some of my friends follow, "no email checking" hour everyday at their work for focus. It's working really well for them and I'm thinking of giving it a shot too.
Very interesting write up Harj. I too deleted my Gmail sometime back but my motivation was different: I want to build an app with which I could write to anyone on email but vice-versa was not true.
Well it kind of started that way and after a few months of agony (unable to connect smoothly) and joy (better concentration) I am now with something interesting that you should see: http://bubbleideas.com
isn't it kind of arrogant to think that people would want to read what you have to say, but not the other way around?
There's already an app to do that, it's called SMTP, just don't use POP. After a few weeks you'll be so unpopular with your friends that you wont even need to switch off POP.
Yes you are right, but that is how I started on the problem of mail noise. I have come some distance since and have implemented a sort of 100% spam-less model where people can write to me once they are within my solicited network. We use quality of the connections (strange-ti-vity or closeness) to block or allow to & fro of private mails.
Strangers and people outside my network can also approach me somewhat, but they cannot not send me direct mails until I am hooked to them somehow - which is, like 'to be in the solicited network'. It is something like Twitter's DM & Tweet model except here we write mails instead of tweets.
One thing I would really love in an email client is a strong separation between reading and writing email. During productive hours when I'm sitting at my desk, I would really like to be able to 1) open GMail, 2) read old email 3) Write new email.
I absolutely do not want the ability to read new email during that time. In fact, I would really like to set up GMail so email only arrives on a fixed schedule, say 2-4 times a day.
On a vacation a few months ago I turned off automatic email fetching on my phone to try and eke out a few more hours of battery, and just kind of left it there to see what would happen.
On an average day I hit the "get my email" button twice. Once when I wake up in the morning to see if there's anything pressing, and once on my way home from work as I'm walking towards the train.
I have absolutely not missed the disruption that having a constantly-up-to-date email client in your pocket creates.
I have also yet to miss a single email due to this - people have better sense than that. If they need a quick response they know to call me or to text.
From this I've started pruning the apps and services that can interrupt me pretty hard. At this point I'm down to my calendar, my SMS client, FB direct messages, and the NYTimes (they seem to be pretty responsible, but they are on a short leash). It's worked out. I'm very much enjoying this pull lifestyle, instead of push.
This is definitely a great idea, I've been thinking of different ways to accomplish it myself. The research backs this up too as a very reasonable solution, allowing workers to still be productive in replying, while only checking new email at certain intervals.
In fact, you've even come across the magic number for email checking frequency. Checking it 4 times a day provides the best trade-off between reply speed and productivity gain, as seen in research by Gupta et. al.[1]
[1] Gupta, A., Sharda, R., & Greve, R. a. (2010). You’ve got email! Does it really matter to process emails now or later? Information Systems Frontiers
It would be even better on smartphones; constantly having the new mail icon pop up on is so distracting that I have turned off automatic email checking on my phone, and just check manually every couple hours when not near a computer. This was after being surprised not to be able to find an option to control gmail's polling interval.
I use K-9 Mail on my Android phone. It lets me set up per folder poll intervals and per folder push settings. Eg, I can have email from one folder pushed to my phone on delivery (using IMAP IDLE), another folder to be polled once every two hours, another daily, and the rest manually.
Your "smartphone" doesn't sound very smart.
[Edit] I use sieve filters on the server side to route email into various folders on delivery.
[Edit2] I just double checked, and the "per folder settings" are not quite as granular as I thought. You can only set up one poll interval and add that to a selection of folders, and then set other folders to push or nothing. You can't have multiple poll intervals. Eg, Could set two folders to push, three folders to poll hourly, and the rest to manual only polls.
It solves your problem. You'd be giving up the Gmail web client, but the Gmail web client has turned to crap lately and other mail clients have grown an "archive" button and a usable search feature, so there's no compelling reason not to switch.
Sounds good, but it will introduce new problems: 1) someone called and said "I sent you that urgent email; didn't you get it?!?" and you had forgotten about the rules you set up for email receipt. 2) Services that send email notifications now have to add another reminder so people may have to check their email rules in addition to the Spam folder in case mail is "lost" there.
So just have a manual "get mail" button that you can mash like every other mail client ever. If someone sends me an urgent email, and it's genuinely urgent, they'll follow it up with a phone call or a text or an IM, and then I can mash the "get mail" button.
The fact that someone else thinks an email is urgent does not mean that I'll think it is.
And if it really is urgent, they can call me. Unless you're the kind of person who both sends an email and then immediately calls me about it. If you're that kind of person you quickly will be informed of how much I dislike that. If you persist, I'll take advantage of my freedom as a contractor to choose my own projects, and you'll soon not be a person that has any reason to interact with me.
If it's urgent you should still call first to confirm that the person is available and able to deal with what you need them to deal with and that what you're sending them is what they need.
Anything else risks wasting a bunch of people's time going back and forth which if it's genuinely urgent (it usually isn't) everyone should want to avoid.
If someone's likely to call you to follow up on an "important" email that isn't important, turning off email doesn't help. You'll still get a vibrate/ring, look down at your phone, and decide whether or not to pick it up -- exactly the kind of distraction we're trying to avoid here.
The problem with the call-me-with-only-urgent-stuff approach is the Boy Who Cried Wolf problem: if people are constantly calling you (because they know they're not going to get a reply until later in the day, and they need it <whine>noowwwwwwwww</whine>, you'll put your phone on DND/silent. But now you can't respond to actual emergencies.
In the first case, you must take action to appease them, whether replying to the email or taking their call. (Or you could script your interaction with them; an automatic email reply or such. But that's suboptimal too). It's outside of your control.
In the second case, they aren't able to distinguish what they consider to be emergencies from what are actual emergencies; this, too, is out of your control.
I honestly don't know how to deal with these. Thoughts?
My solution is as I described. I make it clear that I am unhappy. I make it clear why. And if they refuse to listen, I arrange my work so that they have no excuse for trying to ruin my day.
I'm actually working on a product right now that provides that precise functionality (and more!) for Gmail. It also lets you schedule when your email arrives for specific groups or single contacts. It's https://lightermail.com and we'll be opening up the beta in a week or so. Hope it helps
Just to comment on your landing page: Your comment here told me much more about what this is about than the copy there.
Unless you're counting on the incoming links' context to inform people what it's about (if you do, fair enough), I'd suggest a bit more info to the potential users.
This searches gmail for "before:2012/08/29 in:inbox" where date depends on your current date.
I would love to use a search like before:2012/08/29 OR circle:"vip" [1] unfortunately doesn't seem to work. circle:"vip" alone works great but fails with "OR".
I'm achieving exactly this with my local email client. Okay, it's not a fancy web application, but exactly that's making it so valuable for me.
When I open my email client, it shows all "old" mail to me, and allows me to write new emails. It only fetches new emails when I explicitly tell it to do that.
I'm using Mutt, but I think this should work with any other email client such as Thunderbird. All you have to do is disabling the auto-fetching of new emails. And if you still feel the urge to hit the "Get Mail" button, then just configure it away from the toolbar.
tl;dr: It's all there - you just need a tiny configuration change in your email client.
Perfect example of something that's been available for ages but people somehow think they need a shiny web app (SaaS with a monthly subscription, of course) to do.
Here is my system of not wasting too much time on e-mail: I only have one client application set up to access my various accounts - Zimbra Desktop, which I don't have any entries for in the OS menu, and I don't know any passwords myself as they are randomly generated and stored in KeyPassX.
Every day a cronjob starts up the client at 4pm, which starts minimized (thank you, KDE), proceeds to fetch new mail, apply various filters (e.g. CCs marked read and archived), and maximizes the window 2 minutes later.
Half an hour later another cronjob does a 'killall' on it - that way if I wasn't at my desk at 4, I wouldn't have to come back to be greeted by unanswered e-mails.
And, as the article says, there is always a mobile phone for anything truly urgent.
That is about the craziest idea for handling mail I've heard in a while. I'm not sure if I like it or hate it -- it certainly is a bit sad that (presumably) handling of mail is so slow you need to give the client 2 minutes to sort things out.
What happens if you're writing a reply at 16:32? Do you start over the next day?
You need to classify this based on what type of work you do. For a developer, checking email would knock him off the zone. For a different job, one email answered late would mean a lost business for example. (the OP is a YC partner)
Very true. An algorithm that prioritises email threads based on dates mentioned (including keywords & phrases like "tomorrow", "after lunch") as well as tone ("No problem!" vs "Guys this is really dragging on!") would be a cool project to work on.
I made a simple "word monitor" for my emails that can make assumptions about gender, social status etc based on words that are considered 1st person singular, 1st person plural, articles, emotion, cognitive, and social. Works ok but really needs a lengthy email to make heads or tails of any hidden information/agendas embodied within.
I have never bothered upgrading to a 'smart' phone - I am happy with my flip phone that is great at making calls and texting. I don't need games, I don't need email access and I don't need the poor battery life a lot of those phones suffer from. I charge my phone once every 3 or 4 days and I am happy.
Should the need arise, I generally carry my netbook with me everywhere I go - and it only comes out if there is an emergency. At least then I have internet access and all the tools to actually make a difference as opposed to just being able to respond to an email. If it isn't an emergency, then it can wait.
I find myself in the strange position of doing mobile apps for a living but not really using my own smartphone much. The main thing that would keep me from going back to a flip phone is that texting on a phone keyboard is just too painful.
I also find the maps application pretty useful sometimes, but I have uninstalled a bunch of other distracting time wasters from the phone.
I couldn't go back to texting on a standard keypad, but I find the keyboard on the Alias 2 to be quite straightforward and is generally quite painless (except when I miss the space bar and hit the end key - that's just poorly placed).
I was running an agency up until recently which did mobile apps. Always an interesting conversation walking into a new client meeting with my "burner" Nokia 1610 and explaining that I knew what I was talking about but had made a conscious decision to disconnect.
I hear you on that. As far as the cell phone companies are concerned I don't own a smart phone, but I wanted to write some apps for one so I got a used phone and hook it up to WiFi when it's time to code.
Leechblock got me out of the habit of spending too much time reading various blogs/sites. I set it to block a certain set of sites between 10-12,13-17 hours.
It's trivial to work around if you want to, but having the "blocked" page pop up is a good reminder that I didn't want to be wasting my time and should get back to work.
Another issue with email on the phone is that I find myself replying to emails out of habit, in many cases to emails which require some thought in the response and half-ass te response because I'm on a smartphone and don't have a real keyboard.
Deactivate push messages from your phone mail app and only allow for manual checking. I did that. And now I have to wait to read email which is usually enough time to drop the crack.
It might not work if the internet is way fast like it is in the US. I am in the DR which might make a difference...
Right now I have an iPhone 4, a Galaxy Nexus, and a BlackBery Bold 9900 in front of me. I do dev work, so I flip between devices fairly regularly.
My Bold is still my daily device. Sure, the other two phones are better in almost all ways, but e-mail and unified messaging is one thing RIM knows how to do. At a quick glance, I can see incoming e-mails, SMS, twitter or Facebook, and know if I need to respond. I can set up different audible alerts for each and/or different coloured LEDs.
I rarely have my desktop e-mail client open, since my BlackBerry helps me filter out messages as needed while I work.
You can rally against me if you like, but I like my BlackBerry better than my other devices. It simply works for me. And I think this aversion to e-mail/distractions is a by-product of the devices being used.
Could someone unwilling to pay for a wireless data plan but willing to pay for a BlackBerry Bold 9900 benefit from this unified messaging you speak of?
I ask because the Bold does have Wifi.
To benefit from this unified messaging, it looks like I would need access to BlackBerry's servers. Is it even possible to get access or buy this access without buying a wireless data plan?
Great real-world anecdote, it's really refreshing to see busy people (I'm assuming Harj is a pretty busy person) understanding the implications of email overload and trying to deal with it.
Not everyone needs to completely remove email from their phones, but doing simple things like turning off push notifications and trying to push one's self to only check at certain intervals has been shown by research (and substantiated by experiences like this) to have huge upsides to productivity, lower stress levels, and creativity.
I'm learning a huge amount in this arena, it's a fascinating topic. If anyone wants to see a very cursory summary of what I've assembled so far, check out a small deck at http://www.slideshare.net/jlyman/email-overload-13506201
Why such a hatred, not in this piece, but trending, against e-mail? It doesnt bother me much. What i did instead, i dropped my phone, figuratively speaking of course. A month ago i switched, lastly, my phone off. What a relief, no more calls, no more call when i'm busy, no more missed calls and whats more important, no questions about why you didnt answer, called back, etc. I'm free!
Don't answer them when they're interrupting or you don't feel like it (that's what I do). But, sometimes, people have genuine reasons to want to disturb you (something very important, or in emergency). That's I finally bought an iPhone instead of iPod touch and am much happier now.
> Don't answer them when they're interrupting or you don't feel like it
And then come up with excuse after excuse why you didn't answer. I got tired of it and got a phone that works... almost. It does allow me to read and send texts and to hear what the person on the other end is speaking when I pick up a call. But the microphone is broken and there is no way for me to give them an answer, which causes them to call really rarely if at all. And if they ask I can truthfully say that, well, my phone is broken, sorry... I'll call you from home or from office, or wherever, but generally later, when I feel like it.
It's still a violent interrupt - I use the silent, no vibrate, technique mentioned above, with an exception for my wife and my business partner both of whom know not to call unless they mean it. Everyone else gets used to voicemail pretty quickly I find.
On my iPhone I either use silent mode without vibration (when I want events to still reach my phone but not me unless I look at it) or airplane mode (when I want to completely go off the mesh).
At iDoneThis, we have several shared email inboxes (Helpscout is fantastic for this: http://helpscout.net). What ends up happening is that most of our emails are processed out of shared inboxes, which makes it easier to respond in batch (as Harj points out) while still showing responsiveness (because people batch at different times). We end up hardly using our personal company email addresses.
Would be good to setup a system where you are able to get people to label something as urgent and you would still get this otherwise you would see it when you wanted. Depending on who is sending the majority of email your way and your social relationships this could work well.
Yeah it depends on who is emailing you. For Harj it is probably startups/ investors/ press etc, where there can be some social pressure upon using some kind of urgent tag only when it is genuinely urgent.
If most of your emails are customers who always want service right now then it is going to be a bit different.
Author raises a lot of good points. And given how tied we are to technology it's really good there's continual interest in us evaluating it in our lives and how we feel about it.
The pendulum seems to have shifted in recent times and I think we're all going through something analogous to the drinkers/smokers in the 60's/70's. Those were feel-good times of indulgence and merriness. We realized the consequences though and learned moderation as a society. I have a feeling we're about 10-20 years from coming to terms with a healthy technology lifestyle.
Once you delete fb, twitter, mail, quora, etc. from your phone, why not just carry an e-ink Kindle or a paper notebook/calendar and some kind of music player?
Smartphones still have some utilities I depend upon e.g. I'd be lost most of the time if I didn't have the maps application and I don't believe that forcing myself to not be reliant on it would be a productivity gain.
Anecdotally: OmniFocus, dictionaries, pzizz, Skype, all-in-one banking app, a decent camera. My iPad or an iPod touch would have all of those, but then I'd have to carry two devices (I'd need a dumbphone for occasional calls). No data plan, no notifications at all (except for some slow-moving badges), and I still love my iPhone.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadFor my sanity, I have email notifications turned off on my phone, so I only get new messages when I explicitly open the app (which I still find I do much too often). Definitely helps.
http://www.atlassian.com/time-wasting-at-work-infographic
Plus composing a reply is time-consuming in itself- you often need to look up something, check a document, etc. etc.
The issue is the cognitive load introduced by task switching. You may not realize it on the surface, but breaking away each time to write a reply (or even to a lesser extent just the mere fact that you are now notified there's a message waiting) is causing a huge distraction for your brain, and slowing down your "real" work.
[1] Paul Hemp. 2009. "Death by information overload," Harvard Business Review 87(9).
If you get interrupted a lot it helps to take notes on a pad, kind of use it as your "stack" and just list out what you're doing so when you're done you can go back to that frame of mind more easily.
Well it kind of started that way and after a few months of agony (unable to connect smoothly) and joy (better concentration) I am now with something interesting that you should see: http://bubbleideas.com
There's already an app to do that, it's called SMTP, just don't use POP. After a few weeks you'll be so unpopular with your friends that you wont even need to switch off POP.
Strangers and people outside my network can also approach me somewhat, but they cannot not send me direct mails until I am hooked to them somehow - which is, like 'to be in the solicited network'. It is something like Twitter's DM & Tweet model except here we write mails instead of tweets.
I absolutely do not want the ability to read new email during that time. In fact, I would really like to set up GMail so email only arrives on a fixed schedule, say 2-4 times a day.
why not do it then? it's pretty simple to do?
I think the real reason is that you like the idea of doing that, but not the reality.
Cultural atavism might sound like a good idea, but the reality is the positive benefits of email and smartphones way outweighs the negatives.
On a vacation a few months ago I turned off automatic email fetching on my phone to try and eke out a few more hours of battery, and just kind of left it there to see what would happen.
On an average day I hit the "get my email" button twice. Once when I wake up in the morning to see if there's anything pressing, and once on my way home from work as I'm walking towards the train.
I have absolutely not missed the disruption that having a constantly-up-to-date email client in your pocket creates.
I have also yet to miss a single email due to this - people have better sense than that. If they need a quick response they know to call me or to text.
From this I've started pruning the apps and services that can interrupt me pretty hard. At this point I'm down to my calendar, my SMS client, FB direct messages, and the NYTimes (they seem to be pretty responsible, but they are on a short leash). It's worked out. I'm very much enjoying this pull lifestyle, instead of push.
In fact, you've even come across the magic number for email checking frequency. Checking it 4 times a day provides the best trade-off between reply speed and productivity gain, as seen in research by Gupta et. al.[1]
[1] Gupta, A., Sharda, R., & Greve, R. a. (2010). You’ve got email! Does it really matter to process emails now or later? Information Systems Frontiers
It would be even better on smartphones; constantly having the new mail icon pop up on is so distracting that I have turned off automatic email checking on my phone, and just check manually every couple hours when not near a computer. This was after being surprised not to be able to find an option to control gmail's polling interval.
Your "smartphone" doesn't sound very smart.
[Edit] I use sieve filters on the server side to route email into various folders on delivery.
[Edit2] I just double checked, and the "per folder settings" are not quite as granular as I thought. You can only set up one poll interval and add that to a selection of folders, and then set other folders to push or nothing. You can't have multiple poll intervals. Eg, Could set two folders to push, three folders to poll hourly, and the rest to manual only polls.
And if it really is urgent, they can call me. Unless you're the kind of person who both sends an email and then immediately calls me about it. If you're that kind of person you quickly will be informed of how much I dislike that. If you persist, I'll take advantage of my freedom as a contractor to choose my own projects, and you'll soon not be a person that has any reason to interact with me.
Anything else risks wasting a bunch of people's time going back and forth which if it's genuinely urgent (it usually isn't) everyone should want to avoid.
The problem with the call-me-with-only-urgent-stuff approach is the Boy Who Cried Wolf problem: if people are constantly calling you (because they know they're not going to get a reply until later in the day, and they need it <whine>noowwwwwwwww</whine>, you'll put your phone on DND/silent. But now you can't respond to actual emergencies.
Maybe we should go back to pagers...
In the second case, they aren't able to distinguish what they consider to be emergencies from what are actual emergencies; this, too, is out of your control.
I honestly don't know how to deal with these. Thoughts?
This is not a feasible solution for everyone.
Then, when you want to check your new email, search for that tag, and un-archive the messages you actually want in your inbox.
Unless you're counting on the incoming links' context to inform people what it's about (if you do, fair enough), I'd suggest a bit more info to the potential users.
I would love to use a search like before:2012/08/29 OR circle:"vip" [1] unfortunately doesn't seem to work. circle:"vip" alone works great but fails with "OR".
[1] GMail Search parmaters http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...
When I open my email client, it shows all "old" mail to me, and allows me to write new emails. It only fetches new emails when I explicitly tell it to do that.
I'm using Mutt, but I think this should work with any other email client such as Thunderbird. All you have to do is disabling the auto-fetching of new emails. And if you still feel the urge to hit the "Get Mail" button, then just configure it away from the toolbar.
tl;dr: It's all there - you just need a tiny configuration change in your email client.
If you're a commandline junkie, Sup and Notmuch both come pretty close to a gmail-style "search everything / tags everywhere" philosophy.
Every day a cronjob starts up the client at 4pm, which starts minimized (thank you, KDE), proceeds to fetch new mail, apply various filters (e.g. CCs marked read and archived), and maximizes the window 2 minutes later.
Half an hour later another cronjob does a 'killall' on it - that way if I wasn't at my desk at 4, I wouldn't have to come back to be greeted by unanswered e-mails.
And, as the article says, there is always a mobile phone for anything truly urgent.
What happens if you're writing a reply at 16:32? Do you start over the next day?
And I am guessing that if the process's main window is already maximized, the 16:32 job has no effect.
If I knew how to set up the same sequence of scheduled jobs around Mail.app on OS X, I would.
I made a simple "word monitor" for my emails that can make assumptions about gender, social status etc based on words that are considered 1st person singular, 1st person plural, articles, emotion, cognitive, and social. Works ok but really needs a lengthy email to make heads or tails of any hidden information/agendas embodied within.
Should the need arise, I generally carry my netbook with me everywhere I go - and it only comes out if there is an emergency. At least then I have internet access and all the tools to actually make a difference as opposed to just being able to respond to an email. If it isn't an emergency, then it can wait.
I also find the maps application pretty useful sometimes, but I have uninstalled a bunch of other distracting time wasters from the phone.
It's trivial to work around if you want to, but having the "blocked" page pop up is a good reminder that I didn't want to be wasting my time and should get back to work.
It might not work if the internet is way fast like it is in the US. I am in the DR which might make a difference...
My Bold is still my daily device. Sure, the other two phones are better in almost all ways, but e-mail and unified messaging is one thing RIM knows how to do. At a quick glance, I can see incoming e-mails, SMS, twitter or Facebook, and know if I need to respond. I can set up different audible alerts for each and/or different coloured LEDs.
I rarely have my desktop e-mail client open, since my BlackBerry helps me filter out messages as needed while I work.
You can rally against me if you like, but I like my BlackBerry better than my other devices. It simply works for me. And I think this aversion to e-mail/distractions is a by-product of the devices being used.
Could someone unwilling to pay for a wireless data plan but willing to pay for a BlackBerry Bold 9900 benefit from this unified messaging you speak of?
I ask because the Bold does have Wifi.
To benefit from this unified messaging, it looks like I would need access to BlackBerry's servers. Is it even possible to get access or buy this access without buying a wireless data plan?
Not everyone needs to completely remove email from their phones, but doing simple things like turning off push notifications and trying to push one's self to only check at certain intervals has been shown by research (and substantiated by experiences like this) to have huge upsides to productivity, lower stress levels, and creativity.
I'm learning a huge amount in this arena, it's a fascinating topic. If anyone wants to see a very cursory summary of what I've assembled so far, check out a small deck at http://www.slideshare.net/jlyman/email-overload-13506201
And then come up with excuse after excuse why you didn't answer. I got tired of it and got a phone that works... almost. It does allow me to read and send texts and to hear what the person on the other end is speaking when I pick up a call. But the microphone is broken and there is no way for me to give them an answer, which causes them to call really rarely if at all. And if they ask I can truthfully say that, well, my phone is broken, sorry... I'll call you from home or from office, or wherever, but generally later, when I feel like it.
I just ignore them all now; pretty similar to ads on web. And I have them available everywhere if I actually need them.
Harsh but the boy who cried wolf and all.
If most of your emails are customers who always want service right now then it is going to be a bit different.
The pendulum seems to have shifted in recent times and I think we're all going through something analogous to the drinkers/smokers in the 60's/70's. Those were feel-good times of indulgence and merriness. We realized the consequences though and learned moderation as a society. I have a feeling we're about 10-20 years from coming to terms with a healthy technology lifestyle.