Adrian Guy Crook

Saw this post on TechCrunch this morning about MG Siegler (@parislemon) deciding to “quit” email by not responding to it for a month. The Office Space reference he makes is gold. Full text here of one of my favorite parts of that classic film:

Peter Gibbons: I uh, I don’t like my job, and, uh, I don’t think I’m gonna go anymore.
Joanna: You’re just not gonna go?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Joanna: Won’t you get fired?
Peter Gibbons: I don’t know, but I really don’t like it, and, uh, I’m not gonna go.
Joanna: So you’re gonna quit?
Peter Gibbons: Nuh-uh. Not really. Uh… I’m just gonna stop going.
Joanna: When did you decide all that?
Peter Gibbons: About an hour ago.
Joanna: Oh, really? About an hour ago… so you’re gonna get another job?
Peter Gibbons: I don’t think I’d like another job.
Joanna: Well, what are you going to do about money and bills and…
Peter Gibbons: You know, I’ve never really liked paying bills. I don’t think I’m gonna do that, either.

In the article, MG claims his life might be 30-50% better if he could eliminate email. He probably gets a lot more email than I do, so I understand the sentiment. But as a game consultant and Gmail fanatic, I pride myself on my elaborate system of filters and labels and a ruthless Unsubscribe habit that keeps my personal inbox to a manageable sub-50 conversations level at most times.

But not all my clients are content to use my personal email. As a result, I have two Outlook inboxes to check as well - one via the horrific Outlook Web Access, the other via the only slightly less horrific Outlook for OSX. When you’re hooked up to the firehose of Everyone emails, internal spam and build notifications without access to easily set up rules to help prune them, it’s easy to see why people loathe email.

So if I were an internal employee, MG’s plan to quit email might be more attractive - and potentially much easier - to implement. I could still walk around and talk to people and everyone would know where to find me if it were urgent.

But as as consultant who rarely works on-site, email is the one guaranteed place people can track me down. Most often, my clients can’t walk down the hall to find me because I’m several miles or a country away. So to stop responding to email would be seen by my clients as a needless eccentricity at best, professional suicide at worst.

However, in my own bid to reclaim some communication sanity, I have managed to do without a phone number connected to a real phone for about a year now. The Canadian telephony oligarchy billed me $500+ per month one too many times and I cut the cord. So by not having a real phone for a year, I’ve racked up actual savings of thousands of dollars and avoided the tyranny of unscheduled phone calls from who-knows-whom.

Unlike if I were to quit email, my lack of a phone hasn’t seemed to matter as my clients nearly always find me on Skype and schedule our calls ahead of time. I still have my old mobile number connected to a $10/month service that can redirect calls or simply transcribe voicemails and email them to me. But I Ieave it on the latter setting, receiving maybe one phone message a week to my Gmail inbox, usually from a government agency (census reminder!) or car dealership reminding me of a service date for a vehicle we sold three years ago.

I’m happy with the decision to quit my phone for a number of reasons - cost savings and avoidance of calls from randoms chief among them. But quitting email doesn’t hold the same allure. I check email when I want to, reply sparingly and succinctly and spend no time sorting my Outlook inboxes into folders manually.

For me at least, email is not the evil it used to be.