Posted November 6, 2001 Student Affairs Online, 2 (Fall)
I'm a pack rat. I freely admit it. My attic is chock full of memories from years past. File drawers are crammed with mementos and documents that serve no earthly purpose. My collection of Broadway show programs (Playbills) spans over 30 years. And don't forget my National Lampoon magazines from the early 1970's (when they were humorous).
This penchant for saving has, unfortunately, spilled over to my method for handling the myriad number of e-mails I receive each day. Simply put, I am loathe to delete and too lazy to properly file these electronic correspondence in any logical fashion.
This admission would probably surprise friends and colleagues who think of me as some sort of technophile; who know me as a person accessing his e-mail morning, noon, and night; whose hands begin trembling from withdrawal symptoms after two days absent from the keyboard's touch. Yet this proclivity for cyber messages doesn't necessarily translate into an orderly disposition on my part. Why? Three reasons. First, through no fault of my own, is the general explosion of e-mail usage in today's society. The sheer magnitude can overwhelm even the most anal-retentive soul. Every time I turn around there are dozens of e-mails in each of my multiple accounts. With the increased volume of electronic correspondence how could any sane individual keep up? Delete? Retain? File? Agonizing decisions. Secondly, hard drive space has expanded exponentially. We don't use the term "megabyte" anymore to measure the size of an internal hard drive. Now, it's how many "gigabytes." So much space fosters a "devil may care" attitude on saving e-mails.
The third reason cannot be blamed on outside forces. As a prize-winning procrastinator I invariably put off today, saving for tomorrow. A sobering example materialized a few months ago. I had signed up for an electronic collection system for the utility bill. Alerted by a monthly e-mail, payment was a snap. Or should have been. The problem occurred when I continued, month after month, to gloss over the billing announcements routed to my inbox. "I'll get to it later" was my mantra. It wasn't until the shutoff notice arrived--via U.S. mail--that I realized my inattention had spanned four consecutive months.
Unusual? Perhaps. But isn't it human nature to relegate boring, nonessential tasks to the bottom of the heap? How many of us jump at the opportunity to balance the checkbook? Mow the lawn? Tidy up the garage? Somehow organizing one's e-mail falls in-between cleaning out the fishtank and defrosting the freezer. A more academic view is taken by Ned Kock, of the Fox School of Business and Management at Temple University. In a July 2001 New York Times article, he states "there is an excitement to reading and replying [to e-mail], but filing takes cognitive effort without an immediate reward." Deferred rewards are anathema to our existence. We like things now, at once, this instant. Microwaveable dinners. Drive thru eateries. Hitting the send button or opening a virus-free attachment is instant gratification.
In one sense, my organizational behavior is replicating, in an electronic configuration, those piles of "stuff" off to the side of my desk waiting to be processed. These accumulations, as with the shelved e-mails, grow faster than mushrooms after a spring rain. But the make-up of both are remarkably similar--announcements to upcoming events, job postings from some faraway outpost, phone numbers and addresses waiting to be catalogued, position papers and articles asking for input...The list drones on and on.
The cure for my idiosyncratic disposition? An antidote to my woes? Short of undergoing endless hours of therapy, harking back to the "old days" (think MacPlus) might be the simplest of answers. Then, electronic mail, for most of us, was an alien concept. Canceling all my e-mail accounts would instantly solve my dilemma. No filing concerns or deletion decisions. I may even begin to write actual letters again, call long forgotten friends, schedule more face-to-face appointments... On the other hand, maybe life isn't so bad after all.