I may need a government bail out. At the rate information pours into my email and PDA, I fear that my planned time away from the office tomorrow will leave me hopelessly buried in electronic obligations that I will be unable to pay. I’ll likely have to declare Information Bankruptcy. This is an advanced form of  Email Bankruptcy, in which I seem to be finding myself more and more.  This is such an insidious problem that I feel compelled to provide the following public service announcement:

To say one has “information overload”  has become cliché, yet the multi-headed beast of email and social networking that hounds us daily will not go away and either has to be fed daily, or dealt with in some other way.

Social networking can be easily controlled with a little willpower – Just Say No, as Nancy Reagan would advise.  Drop the mantra of “Live to Tweet, Tweet to Live.”   Inbound email, on the other hand, is not within our control, so Lawrence Lessig’s prescription for declaring email bankruptcy is very tempting:

1) Collect the email addresses of everyone you haven’t replied to. Paste them into the BCC field of a new message that you’ll send to yourself.

2) Write a polite note explaining your predicament.  Genuinely apologize and promise to keep up with your email in the future. Try to sound credible.

3) Ask for a resend of anything particularly pressing, and offer to give such messages special attention.

 
And yet having done that, I’m reminded by another veteran of the email wars that this is only a temporary fix because the underlying problem has not been addressed:

A one-time erasure of communication debt would give temporary relief, but the basic challenge remains; the net number of requests for my attention exceeds my ability to provide that attention by at least an order of magnitude. And the disparity around my ability to thoughtfully respond to my pile may be ten or more times worse still. The scale is insanely out of whack.

 
So, email bankruptcy may not be enough to save us. The problem is that human beings simply don’t scale. We just can’t add another processor or more memory. Now throw LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, et. al. on the fire, and the blaze is completely out of control. The next logical step up would be total Information Bankruptcy, which would include any form of electronic communication that demands our near-constant attention.  It would be extremely difficult to pull this off without committing occupational suicide, but there are things we can do to improve our lot.  Does your Blackberry really need to go off everytime a network interface flaps?  Better to adjust the monitoring system than to get awake every 5 minutes from 2:49 AM to 4:30 AM during maintenance windows.

No, we can’t pull completely out of the Information Matrix, but I do believe taming the monster is possible.  It requires good email hygiene and the cooperation of others, which starts with us. At risk of stating the obvious, email is not the only way, and certainly not always the best way to communicate.  So the call to action is this: Take better advantage of IM, texting, and (shock) the telephone.  And if the target of your message is in the next office or cubicle, get up and deliver the message in person!   Scale your communication method to the type of bandwidth required.   If you’re typing more than a paragraph or have to hit Page Down to review your message, you probably ought to be picking up the phone instead.

If you’ve emailed me recently and I haven’t responded, please don’t be offended.   I’ll get back to you soon…really. That is, of course, if you don’t get a bankruptcy notice from me first.

//spk

p.s.  If you agree with me on this, please send me an email.

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Tags: email, email bankruptcy, Human Factors, overload, scalability