People of my generation acquired the habit at work. We didn't face the problem so early in life. With me, it started when I received my first Blackberry. Those of us who acquired the habit this way soon realized our new "device" was really a leash. Every waking hour of our workdays, weekends, holidays, vacation, and even sick days, we were available. Contact was often made via email--it saved the sender from having to offer the perfunctory apology (sorry for calling you--at this hour, on a weekend, during your vacation, etc., but....), We really felt obliged to check our mail all the time, whether at work or not. Thus, we became available to our bosses, colleagues, internal and external customers all the time.
Anyway, for the past dozen or so years, I have carried a portable device and habitually checked my mail--probably at least every thirty minutes. When traveling on business, I would sometimes be awakened by some hotel noise or another, and I'd find myself checking my mail before I tried to get back to sleep. For those of you who believe that such a habit automatically disappears when you stop working fulll-time--not so fast there. I have been retired and away from work for almost two years, and the habit persisted.
But today, I can tell you I have been mysteriously cured. As I write this, it has been thirteen hours since I checked my email, and I have checked it only one in the past sixteen hours. I'm taking the time to write about this in the interest of discovering just how and why this happened.
As I noted earlier, my generation acquired the habit later in life. We didn't grow up emailing and texting from the age of six. We were in our 40's before texting was even commonly available. We're the ones who still punctuate our text messages. Our Blackberries later became iPhones, although we often still capitalized the "I," since it was the first letter of a proper noun; making it show up as "Iphone," or "IPhone" (unless auto-correct saved us). But that's just the compulsive punctuation habit manifesting itself again.
But back to email. Initially it was almost exclusively business-related. It was, after all, a phone provided by your employer, etc. But quickly, personal email began to grow as part of the mix. The easiest way for friends (and even family) to reach you was to send an email to your work address. Then they could rest assured you would be seeing it in the next twenty or thirty minutes. Text messages later took much of this over, but that's another story. The really big explosion of not-so-business-related email came when we began shopping and buying on the internet. The merchant would ask for your email "to allow them to send an order confirmation and/or tracking information once your item shipped." This initial, useful information was promptly replaced by regular delivery of ads for special sales, ads for new products, "newsletters" packed with more ads, etc. Soon, every business you ever dealt with had launched a newsletter. Newspapers had "online" versions distributed by email. You could get the joke of the day, or the word of the day, or the inspirational quote of the day sent to you as well.
This soon became the IT departments' worst nightmare. Too much space on their servers was being taken up by email. They began trying to ration space, but, if you went to your boss and told him or her this limitation was causing a problem, he or she could go to bat for you and get you a larger, seemingly limitless, allotment.
The whole thing got out of hand if you didn't perform regular maintenance on your inbox. You had to go in and read each item (or at least skim it) to know whether to save it or delete it or consign it to a folder (where email messages go to die an even slower death). All of this took up hours at a time. Management consultants added to their stock advice on time management the statement that you should only check your email two times per day. Too late for us addicts--"Are you kidding? My inbox would be full and messages would start being rejected!"
Eventually, we began the laborious and only occasionally successful process of "unsubscribing" from newsletters and sales lists, provided you answered a series of questions as to why you didn't want to receive them any more and whether a reduced frequency would allow them to stay in touch. This process is also labor-intensive and time-consuming.
But the biggest realization that came to me was that these automated providers of "newsletters," sales ads, online newspapers, inspirational quotes, jokes of the day, etc., were the vast, vast majority of what I'd find in my inbox These are becoming the only ones you could rely on receiving. We're all so busy digesting those we either miss or set aside until we have a little more time the person-to-person messages. On the receiving end, these can also be the emails you were really looking for, the responses to friendly messages you had sent, invitations, questions and more were just sporadic and not-so-reliable, sometimes even non-existent. This can make the experience of checking your email somewhat less pleasant. It finally led to me to decide to just check in occasionally, just in case I had received one of those personal replies every so often. Now, I think I know what cured my addiction. Good luck with yours.
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