Brigid Slipka

Back from some blissful time away and holy kaboly the horrendous slog of email that greeted me.

Remember when folks used to say: well, if you don’t want to read the email all you have to do is delete it? And ‘member how we smirked when they themselves promptly became buried under college newsletters/bank statements/sale notices/PTA reminders/listserv summaries/social media updates/weird requests from hangers-on. And that’s even without reply-alls/Nigerian spam/Great-Aunt Mary’s forwards.

This is why I was super-duper excited to learn of Chris Anderson’s Email Charter. Here’s a couple good points:

…Respect Recipients’ Time
This is the fundamental rule. As the message sender, the onus is on YOU to minimize the time your email will take to process. Even if it means taking more time at your end before sending.

…Celebrate Clarity
Start with a subject line that clearly labels the topic, and maybe includes a status category [Info], [Action], [Time Sens] [Low Priority]. Use crisp, muddle-free sentences. If the email has to be longer than five sentences, make sure the first provides the basic reason for writing. Avoid strange fonts and colors.

The Email Charter urges us to take steps from “drowning in email” and “generating ever more work for our friends and our colleagues” (a charmingly indirect way of saying “you’re making it worse for ME, people.”)

I am totally, utterly for email tips that will make my life easier.

Also! I am totally, utterly unable to make it work.

For example:

Unsubscribe now!

In an attempt to clean out the morass of an inbox that my email has become, I’ve begun unsubscribing to nonprofits’ newsletters run by my friends. Which is hard.

And is even harder when I get a follow up email: Did you really intend to unsubscribe, Ms. Slipka Who Was My Junior Year Roommate? I know these are really automated, but I still open them imagining that it’s personally sent by my friend who’s theater company I’m sure is awesome and if I lived in New York I would totally go see it. But I don’t. So I don’t. And now that I’ve unsubscribed, likely-former-friend prolly doesn’t want me to come, anyway.

Moral of the story: An easy way to not clog up your inbox with friends’ newsletters is to not have friends.

Say thanks except when you shouldn’t!

Here’s another problematic one: Don’t reply just to say “thanks.”

Yikes! This appalls both the fundraiser in me and my learned-at-the-knee-of-my-mother impulses. There must always be thank yous! Proliferately! Multiplicitly! Multi-media-tely!

I tried recently to adhere to this rule. I emailed Sasha Dichter to say: I’d like to be part of the 2012 Generosity Day planning team (which you can do too)!  And he wrote back to say: Glad you’re in!

And I wanted to write back again to say: Thanks! Yay!

But the Email Charter would say: No Contentless Responses! Plus I learned of the Email Charter from Sasha to begin with, plus he’s always writing on his blog about his own email problems. So I sent nothing.

Moral of the story: When something you didn’t do keeps gnawing at you, you may wish to write a note to the other party and explain how you feel silly about the whole episode and wishing you’d been less wishy-washy. Don’t. Instead, post that story on the Internet.

Never reply all!

I got a work request, sent to me and two other people, asking the three of us to participate in a work group. I wrote back just to the sender saying “sure.” Then one of the other women replied all, saying “sure.” The third woman replied all, saying “sure.” So now, from the information in their inboxes, everyone had proof that these two women were happy to help out but that fundraiser with the blog was a bad team player.

Moral of the story: Ban work groups.

Have separate email accounts – Part One!

I used to have an email account specifically for this blog, in order to be organized and save time.

To open the email account, I had to open my regular email, find the special password for the server’s website (what’s with all these *&%$#@ required characters?), click through to the blog server’s site, enter password, click through a bunch of pages to get to the email log-in page, log-in, and finally I’d see my one new message: A spam comment.

Moral of the story: Never store passwords in your email. (Yes, this is a real moral. No, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the problem above. Yes, you should go to that link for helpful password tips. No, this will not explain why those *&%#@ characters are required.)

Have separate email accounts – Part Two!

I’ve had another email address for over fifteen years that I’ve kept strictly to enter into retail sites or news sites or restaurant sites, the kind that require you to sign away the integrity of your online identity in order to gain access to that one bit of information that ends up not helping you anyway. And for that, said company will cheerfully sell your email address to anyone with a dial-up connection and a smidge of homemade snake oil.

Which is why that inbox is chock full of spam.

Which is why I only check it every two months.

Which is why it took me two months to realize it had been hacked.

Thankfully, the email addresses in my contact list were as old as my own address itself, so the vast majority of them were long defunct. Except for professors still teaching at my college, who kindly wrote back to say: Did you get spammed, and hey how’ve you been the last ten years?

And except for parents of friends, because back when I first used this address, folks had one email address for the whole family and when you wrote you had to put the name of your friend in the subject line so her parents’ wouldn’t accidentally open it and learn that their daughter’s college friend was going to bring back from Winter Break for the dorm room a surreptitiously-gotten bottle of Pathmark-brand vodka.

Moral of the story: People still actually use aol.com email addresses. Seriously.

The Outlook is Grim.

At work, I am forced to use the Worst. Email. Software. Ever: Outlook.

Let’s say I’m looking for a specific email. I enter a term into the search box. I see Outlook scroll through my messages, including the specific one I want whiz right by. Then it reports to me: “No messages found.”

So instead, I have to spend time creating little folders and then spend time putting messages into little  folders and then spend time trying to remember which little folder a message was put into and then spend time clicking through all the little folders trying to find it and then spend time trying to make “Search” work Just This Once and then spend time taking deep breaths when the following appears:

“No messages found.”

Also: it always writes in blue.

Moral of the story: Bill Gates is a better philanthropist.

**

I’m trying to figure out how to use all of this to explain why an entire month went by without a post to this blog. I think that it’s something like:

(Email) * (Twitter) * (Google+) * (blog) = (distracted + overwhelmed) * August

but I think I’m missing a division sign in there and besides I was told there would be no math.

So here’s the final moral:

I’m back. I’m back on the webs (not consistently) and back in DC (mostly consistently) and am reconnecting with the world (definitely consistently). But I love it best when I reconnect in person. So let’s set that up. Just email me.