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The E-Mail AddictStop using, start living.

By Michael Agger
Posted Wednesday, May 2, 2007, at 6:30 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

If you want the rest of the 12 steps, you will have to send Marsha Egan $36. When she gives her tele-seminars, people immediately pipe up that their companies would never let them ignore e-mail, even for an hour. She responds that some companies have a "toxic e-mail culture" and that change needs to come from the top. As you might expect, she's working on a new book, The E-Mail Pandemic, which addresses this very issue and its international consequences. The next question the attendees ask is more difficult: "How do I stop the e-mail from coming?"

It never stops, unless you stop sending it. I've noticed that people who give up e-mail for good tend to have a wonderful device that aids them with all of their communication: a secretary. Timothy Ferriss, a young productivity guru who wrote a book called The 4-Hour Workweek, suggests that you send an auto-reply to every message telling correspondents when you check your e-mail. (He likes to check once a day, in the evenings.) There has also been a mini-thread of bloggers and heavy e-mail users who have declared e-mail bankruptcy. They send out a note to everyone in their address book asking them to send fresh e-mails, as they do not intend to reply to any old, unanswered messages.

There's a ring of familiarity to all of this consternation about the "e-mail problem." As you've heard many times, new technology is greeted with anxiety. First, we negotiate how to use it. When the telegraph debuted, books were written about proper telegraphing etiquette. (Initially it was considered impolite to accept an invitation by telegram, but that later changed.) David Shipley and Will Schwalbe's new book Send: The Essential Guide to E-Mail for Office and Home is the successor of books such as John Hill's The Young Secretary's Guide (1687), which taught English clerks how to write acceptable letters at a time when postal service became widespread and affordable. Once we've mastered the form, what was once a convenient marvel proliferates and can become a painful burden. As professor Thomas Augst succinctly put it in his study of 19th-century American clerks: "To receive a letter is to incur an emotional debt." Today, scholars talk of the "communication enslavement" that occurs when someone sends e-mail to someone else.

All of the guides for writing effective e-mail, the strategies for firewalling your attention, the scare stories about parents turning their children into BlackBerry orphans stop short of grasping the essential e-mail achievement. It has erased the boundary between work and life. That's why we don't want to give up our inboxes. Sure, we're miffed when we check e-mail on vacation and get dragged back into work mode, but we just wanted to see if our friend sent us the photos, or if our broker has any new listings to show us when we get back. Not checking e-mail doesn't simply mean checking out of work; it means checking out of your entire social network.

Many people who are addicted to e-mail are more correctly described as addicted to work. Lots of e-mail makes you feel important. E-mail addicts (like me) fear the empty inbox and, strangely, the potential freedom that e-mail provides. A BlackBerry can make you feel accountable at night, but it also lets you say, play golf, while still monitoring any situation that might come up. When business is conducted through e-mail, it shifts the responsibility of actually working off of the physical setting of the office and back onto you. That lack of structure, or the need to provide your own structure, can be uncomfortable. Still, you often find confident people who are immune to e-mail addiction. They just don't understand what the fuss is about. They check e-mail when they need to; they turn it off when they've got stuff to do. It's a tool that serves them. They use the Force.

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Michael Agger is a Slate senior editor. You can reach him at
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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