I have finally finished The Tyranny of E-mail by John Freeman. Given that “e-mail has pulverized our days into bite-sized moments of attention,” what’s to be done?

Freeman’s #1 suggestion: Don’t send.

This is not to say stop engaging in e-mail. But do it thoughtfully. Seriously—it almost seems like a contradiction, doesn’t it? E-mail and impulse go hand in hand. Thought and its second cousin mindfulness are far, far out in left field.

Here’s a guideline: If it’s something you wouldn’t say to a person’s face, don’t send. One of the things I hadn’t thought of (but recognized with a “duh” when I read it) is that inhibitions are often completely dropped in e-mail correspondence (psychologists even have a word for it: disinhibition). If it’s a dig or a snipe that you probably wouldn’t say in person, or if you seriously disagree and you can hear your fingers pounding that keyboard—probably a phone call (or a walk down the hall if it’s a colleague) would be the better approach.

We check our e-mail more often than we drink water. (Who does these studies?) But it gives an interesting perspective. How else can we get this under control?

Well, Don’t Send. Here’s my pet peeve: Overuse of “Reply All”: Does everyone on the distribution list really need to hear what you have to say, or can you simply reply to the sender? Copying 200 people on “Congratulations! Well Done!” is not a good idea (unless, perhaps, you’re the CEO). Do not use e-mail to try to induce joie de vivre.

Another tip to reduce or help manage your e-mail:

Do not check your work e-mail either first thing in the morning or late at night. It puts a little boundary between your private life and your work life, which is a good thing.

Also: Check e-mail only twice a day. What? What? Can anyone do this? And then I read this: “If you work in an environment where many people keep their inboxes open all day…”

And I stopped. Doesn’t everyone at work keep their inboxes open all day? Apparently not. And here’s a no-brainer:

Turn off the instant notification e-mail alert. This simple change has helped me be more focused on my tasks, and then I check e-mail as I move from one task or project to another.

A few more suggestions to save time in the long run:

• Read the entire incoming e-mail before replying.
• Don’t debate complex or sensitive matters by e-mail.
• Set up your desk to do something besides e-mail. Have a spot for work that isn’t done on the computer—a space for reading, thinking, doodling, sketching. A place where you can let your mind wander to that elusive place of creativity and good, deep ideas.

And finally—schedule media-free time every day. Even an hour—no e-mail, no texting, no IMs. No internet? No computer? No phone? No TV? No radio? Take it as far as you like. Your brain will be happy for the rest, and you might realize or learn something really valuable.

The point of writing is not to transmit information but to create information.

Think about that for a minute.

What? A whole minute? Think about something for a whole minute?

So goes my thought train, halfway through reading The Tyranny of E-mail, by John Freeman. The book is an attempt to look at the huge shift in time and space that e-mail has effected, how it’s changed our lives, our culture and workplace, and our psychological well-being. What I’ve learned so far:

• Arabs pioneered the use of carrier pigeons. (Freeman includes a rather longish but fascinating history of written communication.)
• The average corporate worker spends more than 40% of his/her day sending and receiving e-mail.
• We misunderstand the tone of e-mail 50% of the time.
• Because I think it is so important I will repeat: We misunderstand the tone of e-mail 50% of the time.
• There’s also the problem with the auto-fill-in-address function, which makes it easy to accidentally send an e-mail to a whole group. (I laughed and laughed reading about the executive who sent details of his salary to the entire company by accident and pulled the fire alarm in panic.)
• Some companies have e-mail-free Fridays.
• In 2006, the average office worker was interrupted 11 times an hour. The cost of these interruptions (which included e-mail): nearly $600 billion.
• One survey found it took people an average of one minute and forty-four seconds to respond to an e-mail pop-up alert on their computer. (I used to respond even faster than that until I turned the little notifier off.)

According to Freeman, our use of technology has begun to alter our attention span; we’ve started reverse engineering our brains for speed, as opposed to mindfulness—a very sad state of affairs indeed, since I’ve spent the last 20 years trying to improve my level of mindfulness! 

Interrupted every thirty seconds or so, our attention spans are fractured into a thousand tiny fragments. The mind is denied the experience of deep flow, when creative ideas flourish and complicated thinking occurs.

Isn’t that the truth? Just in the last few months I’ve had several coworkers say to me that they spend so much time on e-mail, they feel like they don’t have time to get anything else done. “I don’t have time to think!”

The second half of the book focuses on how we can use e-mail more effectively to help, rather than hinder, our productivity. More on that in a couple of weeks.

Contexts has much to recommend it. One of the more interesting articles in this issue was on hunger, wherein I learned that for the first time in human history, the world is home to more than one billion hungry people. Interestingly, the article suggests that hunger has less to do with a shortage of food than with a shortage of affordable or accessible food. In other words: We have plenty of food, it just isn’t going where it’s needed (or if it is, the people there can’t afford it). Population has grown, yes; but food production has grown even faster.

In Minnesota, more than 1 in 10 households are what is called “food insecure,” meaning that they have difficulty obtaining enough food for all their members due to a lack of money and other resources. One of the things Greater Twin Cities United Way is doing to help address hunger is working with food shelves and food banks to make systems more efficient—primarily by increasing capacity—so that we can get more food to hungry people. You can read more about these efforts on our Website.

A few other things that caught my eye in the winter issue:

• Ageism in the workplace
• Sexism in food advertising
• Civility in U.S. society (going downhill)
• Redefining retirement

And then, when I went to get the links for this blog, I found the most interesting thing of all: Sociological Images. As you might guess from the title, it focuses on interesting visuals—maps, graphics, etc.—that viewers/readers submit. (You know, I wouldn’t have thought that you could even get 2,800 pigs in a square mile.)

While some of the visuals focus on advertising (truth in advertising, silly advertising, misleading advertising), many are simply good depictions of data, like this age pyramid: such a good way to see where we’re going over time in one graphic. Look at all those 85+ women—by 2050, they will be the largest age demographic!

But before January was quite over, I had already started Definite Space by Ann Iverson and The Love of Impermanent Things, by Mary Rose O’Reilley. I once saw Mary Rose O’Reilley at the Hamline Public Library. She has a commonsense approach to life that I find grounding.

Photo credit: Martin Kalfatovic

When it came time to select a new novel, I decided to go local again, but I didn’t feel like a mystery (Ellen Hart, John Sandford) and felt a tug for a little gender balance. I went online for Minnesota fiction authors and found a great list through the St. Paul Public Library. (Are we sensing a St. Paul theme here?)

So I’m planning to round out February with (mostly) Minnesota authors. I have a few in mind: Larry Millett, Diane Jarvenpa, Bill Holm. If you have additional suggestions for Minnesota authors, please send a comment or e-mail me.

I’m thinking about stones for March. As I was looking for local books I happened upon From Stone to Living Word, by Debbie Blue. And I also have Honey from Stone by Chet Raymo. And I know I have a book somewhere about the Rolling Stones. But it’s still February and I am going back to my local books. Suggestions for additional authors (or themes) are welcome.

Photo credit: Viking 79

Photo by mitikusa

I finished my 2009 books-read list over the weekend—always a fun project. Here are 9 of my favorites from the year:

Sabbath, by Wayne Muller. My favorite book of the year, hands down. This is a book I give reverence to, a book that I found grounding and wise with the occasional slap. Read this if you have many things going in your life and you sometimes feel like you don’t know up from down.

Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, by Paul Mason. Read this if you’re looking for a better understanding of how the economic meltdown happened, or feel stupid because you still don’t understand what derivatives are or how they work (a lot of bankers don’t, either). Surprisingly fun and compelling for an economics book.

Agenda for a New Economy, by David C. Korten. Read this if you wonder what our economy might look like if it focused more on Main Street than Wall Street.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, by Winifred Watson. Read this if you like period pieces and are looking for something gentle. Bonus: Frances McDormand is in the movie version which has one significant difference from the book.

Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals, by Agha Shahid Ali. Read this if you have a fondness for ghazals in particular, poetry forms in general, or if you’re simply looking for a seriously good poetry book. 

Listening Below the Noise: A Meditation on the Practice of Silence, by Anne D. LeClaire. Read this book if the idea of an hour of silence makes your heart sing.

Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, by Wendy Johnson. Read this if you’re interested in food, health, nature, cooking, gardening, organics, environment, zen, mythology, spirituality, sustainability, obesity, local farming, or community-supported agriculture. A multidimensional book that’s hard to categorize. Happy making.

The Language of Baklava, by Diana Abu-Jaber. Read this memoir if you wonder about the torn life of an immigrant—missing the homeland, the sweet pull of memory, but also anticipation and excitement over the challenges and possibilities of a new country. If you prefer fiction, try Abu-Jaber’s Crescent, which I also read this year and liked very much.

Gut Symmetries, by Jeanette Winterson. I love Winterson. Seriously, I think she could publish a book of ampersands and I would probably think it was brilliant. This novel is a blend of physics and romance (with a dash of horror)—what better combination? Read this if you enjoy books where you think you’re probably missing 30% of what the author is saying.

A good year for books. Happy New Year (a tad late) to you and yours, and best wishes for good books in 2010!

For example, passages like the following infuriate me:

So now, if you go to a Toyota dealership to look at a Scion (their cheaper, youth-oriented brand), you get a brochure full of pictures of crazy custom Scions, and profiles of the custom fabricators who have built them, typically with a welding helmet perched just so on their heads, and the obligatory wife beater. 

And: 

If different human types are attracted to different kinds of work, the converse is also true: the work a man does forms him.

I found this annoying sexist writing woven throughout the book.

On the other hand, he challenges some assumptions that many of us hold dear, and with very good reasoning. The one that stopped me in my tracks was higher education in general and advanced degrees in particular. Crawford’s criticism isn’t based on envy; he has a Ph.D. in political philosophy. He was the executive director of a think tank for a while, and is currently a motorcycle mechanic and also a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. 

I think what made him begin to question the value of higher education was his first job after getting his master’s degree: “My new job was to read articles in academic journals, index them under established categories, and write abstracts of about two hundred words.” For someone who loves to read and has a broad interest base, it sounds like a dream job.

But as it turns out, not so much. The job is based on the assumption that in writing an abstract, there is a method that merely needs to be applied. There is no need to actually understand the article. Doesn’t that seem a little odd? The starting quota was 15 articles a day. Indexed and abstracted. Before he had been there a year, the quota was up to 28.

Twenty-eight.

That’s a lot of abstracts. I would be pleased as punch if I could index and abstract five academic articles in one day.

Crawford found that meeting the quota “required me to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus.” Seriously, a good academic article can take hours to read and fully understand. (A bad one can take even longer.)

He questions the increasing educational credentials many employers require—often without evidence that the additional education will make them better at those jobs. He references a study of air traffic controllers—a job requiring complex decision making—which found an inverse correlation between educational achievement and job performance. Seriously. Think about that.

And that is why I am enjoying this book. It makes me think. It causes me to question some of my assumptions. 

And that is one of my definitions of an excellent book.

So here is this year’s list of things, great and small:

• A job
• A job I love
• A job I love that includes a blog
• Good friends
• Music
• Books
• Poetry
• Family
• Homemade gravy
• Potato sausage
• Good bread
• Coffee
• Surly Furious
• Wool socks
• Flannel sheets
• Calculators
• Radicals
• Conservatives
• Samosas
• State parks
• My snug little house
• (On a bus line)
• Independent bookstores
• Good graphic designers (who make fun graphics)
• Trees
• The song of the wood thrush
• Good neighbors
• Home mail delivery
• Minnehaha Parkway
• Cows
• The bog in Bemidji
• New bookshelves

Wishing you a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with food, family, laughter, and friends!