What I’ve Learned So Far

That’s what my wife, daughter, and I counted up to last night at the dinner table, what with work e-mail, personal e-mail, Facebook, Twitter (two accounts with two channels each), my physical P.O. box, voicemail, et cetera. Those are just my inboxes, mind you.

This “down periscope” thing is looking better and better.

While I don’t feel the intense pressure about this that my friend Chris Brogan does — he has more responsibilities and a much bigger audience than I do — the you-must-respond-NOW syndrome he diagnoses in his latest post is a pernicious one:

The Assault on Anywhen

We need to cut each other some slack in the timeliness of our communications. We need to cut OURSELVES some slack, too.

Now I’m off to rethink how often I check each inbox. I’m hoping to shock myself with my answers.
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(Photo by Mick Stanic, used under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license.)

Probably this will be my “Rosebud” — the thing that haunts my thoughts throughout my life — but anyway here I go again . . .

You may know that I’ve warned the world before about becoming a Neal Stephenson-like “bad correspondent.”

You may know that I had a vexed relationship with my Gmail inbox for something like a year.

You may know that I obsess at intervals about getting to Inbox Zero — even for Twitter DMs — and staying there.

(You may know that I’m perfectly happy to flog a rhetorical device like “You may know . . . ” well past its expiration date. But I’m done now.)

So, here we are. Once again I awaken to the reality that the communications load in my life is unsustainable. I love talking to people, I’m good at talking to people, and my job depends on talking to people all day long.

BUT . . . if I spend the whole day talking to people, the Real Work doesn’t happen.

Talking to people is Real, too, when it’s sincere and achieves something in terms of human connection or (*gasp*) business success. But I know a lot of really neat people with whom I could talk for hours just for the pleasure of talking. That pleasure is one of life’s high points — but achieving something lasting with your work is even higher.

All that to say this: I’m experimenting with my conversational load.

You likely won’t see me as much on Facebook and Twitter, or, when you do see me, it will be in more concentrated bursts. I may not be as quick to respond to e-mail. You’ll still see me blogging here and elsewhere, but more of my words will be spent in outward transmission rather than in two-way communication.

In sum, you can assume that I will spend more time in my shell than I have been. It’s not you, it’s me.

I hope the results will be worth it.

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(Image by MATEUS_27:24&25, used under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license.)

If you send me a direct message (DM) on Twitter, expect to have it deleted.

WAIT. I know that sounds like complete Twitter geekery, and it’s hard for me to beat that rap after posts like this recent gem, but stick with me here, because it’s not ALL Twitter geekery I’ll be spouting.

Okay, first the Twitter part. If you use Twitter you already know this, but to bring everybody else up to speed, here’s the context: Most of Twitter is carried on publicly, in “tweets” that will be seen by anyone who is following you on the service. (You can follow as many or as few as you like, whether or not they reciprocate. I’m following about 1,140 people and have about 3,300 people following me.) But if you and the other person are both following each other, you can also trade “direct messages” or DMs, which are private between the two of you. Basically, these are like text messages on your phone, travelling in a back-channel parallel to the public tweetstream.

So far, so good? Good.

If you use Twitter as much as I do, and for business purposes like I do, that DM queue can become like another inbox, because it’s an easy way for friends to get in touch with you. And there’s the problem: you can’t archive DMs. There’s no way to store just the ones you want, or to tag only the ones you want to remember. (You can tag public tweets that you want to remember by using the “Favorite” star.)

Since I can’t highlight or archive just the DMs I want — and since I need to remove things from my line of sight that would distract me from what I need to remember — and since in general I’m looking for minimalism in my inboxes . . . I delete every DM that I can.

Which creates another problem: Twitter’s architecture means that when I delete it for me, I delete it altogether and everywhere, so that it also disappears on the sender’s end.

*sigh*

I’d like it if Twitter would let me flag certain DMs for follow-up, or archive — but keep available in storage! — old DMs that don’t need follow-up. But until that happens, if you DM me . . . expect subsequent deletions. Please know that it’s not you, it’s me.

Now for the broader, non-Twitter moral to the story: maybe it’s a good thing that Twitter is so minimalist, as Leo Babuata suggests. Maybe there need not be an archiving or flagging function for DMs, or threaded conversations or any of the other things I’d like to suggest as improvements to Twitter.

But, in general, if you want to increase the utility of any digital communications medium that saves past messages (i.e. not cell phones, which don’t record every call, but e-mail, SMS, etc.), fix it so that a message can be live (in the inbox), dead (deleted), or archived (out of the inbox, but not deleted).

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(Photo by Andy Ciordia, used under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license.)

It’s the twee use of “I’ve” when the contracted “have” isn’t helping another verb.

GOOD:

• “I have an idea about that.”
• “I’ve known her for twenty years.”
• “I’ve done all the laundry.”
• “I’ve got to head to the airport now.”

BAD:

• “I’ve an idea about that.”
• “I’ve a usage peeve to share.”
• “I’ve three guitars.”
• “I’ve an affected take on English diction.”

It applies just as much to “we’ve,” by the way.

Now, go and sin no more.

I was going to write something about how this legion of demon e-mails almost caught me unawares, nearly overwhelming my inbox in a way that could have tipped the scales away from civilization as we know it and toward bloody chaos.

But then I thought: b-o-r-r-r-r-r-i-n-g. And besides — I’ve written that post. (Moral of the story = cut your inbox load down to size.)

Anyway: Demon legion. Me, all by my lonesome, standing in an empty field. Beat them back with nothing but a spear and a proper attitude.

So that was my day. How about you?

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(Photo by Shane Huang, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

I was just passing notes on Facebook with a high-school friend . . . who now lives in Beijing.

We were talking about the ready availability of pizza there. When I lived in Beijing in the summer of 1988, one of the complaints of the American high-school and college students living in my dorm was the lack of pizza anywhere in the city. I have fond memories of hitting a Pizza Hut with two of my traveling companions the night our group got in to Hong Kong.

(Foodies in the audience will be relieved to know that, even at 16, I recognized that pizza — a fortiori pizza from Pizza Hut — was not the food that made Hong Kong famous. Yes, I sampled the local delicacies while I was there.)

So here’s the thing: I’ve been on e-mail steadily since 1994, when I lived in Scotland and used it to talk with friends in the States. But even then — and much more so during my 1988 tour abroad — I was heavily reliant on airmail for my telecommunication.

My mother sent me a series of letters, maybe two per week, while I was in Beijing, and she numbered them so I could see if there were any gaps. Two of them never arrived. I also talked with my parents on the phone a few times while I was in China — a long process that involved dialing a special number for an English-language operator, giving that operator the number to be dialed in the United States, hanging up, and then waiting an indeterminate amount of time (could be two minutes, could be 45 minutes) until the operator called back to complete the call.

The contrast with today will be obvious. I chit-chat with my mom, my dad, my sister, and a host of friends all the time via e-mail, Facebook, blog comments, cell calls, text messages, and Twitter.

You remember that post where I exposed myself? In the wake of that, I’ve become Twitter pals with Mish Gay, who started the “Exposed” project. We talk (read: “trade a few quick tweets”) a time or two per week. She lives in Fremantle, Australia, but I talk to her as much as I do to some of my Austin Twitter pals — and I see her as much (i.e., never) as some of my Austin Twitter pals.

The moral of this story is nothing fancy: it’s easier than ever before for us to communicate with one another. But you knew that.

The real question, I think, is this: what are we doing with it?

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(Photo by Cedric Sam, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

Also “fark,” “frakking,” “farking,” “farging,” et cetera.

The characters on Battlestar Galactica — whence “frak” comes — may be forgiven: they have television censors to deal with. But the rest of us? No.

By the way, I once heard a friend of mine say “What the flip?!” about something. Not that either, please.

My point: we have lots of great epithets in the English language. For that matter, nothing prevents you from shouting “Merde!” when the time is right, with bonus points if you sound like a Parisian cabbie doing it. You can pick and choose what you want to say, and — in my humble opinion — it’s far better to use the swear you actually mean, rather than an Olestra / Splenda / Mockolate version of a swear you’re too timid to actually say.

So, instead of “Thing X is a farking pain to do” — which I read today in a blog comment thread — try one of these:

• Mild: “Thing X is a complete pain to do.”
• Less mild: “Thing X is a complete pain in the ass to do.”
• Warmer: “Thing X is a damn pain in the ass to do.”
• Warmer still but censored: “Thing X is a $%^& pain to do.” (I mean if you actually type “$%^&” as opposed to, say, “gosh-darn.”)
• Hot: Just go ahead and drop the F-bomb. That’s what it’s for.

Who’s with me on this?
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(Image source.)

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that there were more than 1,600 e-mails lurking in my Gmail inbox — most of them unread.

After using many kinds of arcane Inbox-Fu, there are now . . . 11 messages.

Since I’ve taken vicious whacks at my work e-mail, too, there are now less than 80 messages total in all of my inboxes. This is a psychological relief, but it’s also a pragmatic advantage since I’ve more or less stopped using project folders in e-mail. The messages that remain represent most of the live obligations I have underway.

Now to cut that pile down even smaller . . .
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(Photo by Rob Brewer, used under a CC-Share Alike license.)

It’s not you — it’s me.

If (a) you’re following me on Twitter, (b) I’m not following you back, and (c) you care, here are a few relevant notes:

1. I follow back relatively few people — less than half — who follow me. Yes, I’m missing out on many stimulating conversations, possibly including yours, but it’s a defense mechanism I’ve adopted to help manage my limited attention.
2. Notwithstanding the prior point, I’m happy to talk to you, whether we follow each other or not, whenever you get my attention with a tweet to @Twalk.
3. Even with my approach of limited follow-backs, I’ve fallen way, way behind on reviewing the new-follower notifications that Twitter e-mails to me.
4. If these were personal e-mails, I’d never declare “bankruptcy” on them. But since they’re automated notices — in many cases informing me that I was followed by a Twitter spammer — I’m wiping the slate clean rather than trying to dig through a pile of several hundred notifications.
5. If you want me to follow you, the simple expedient is to strike up conversation with me via Twitter.

Thanks for your patience with my sometimes haphazard methods.

~

(Photo by davis.jacque, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

Bear with a kneejerk reaction here, because I haven’t read the connected story, but this item from the New York Times home page gives me pause:

No, psychologists, it’s not an issue of whether Rorschach inkblots will be available online — but how you’ll operate when they’re online.

To repeat a simple concept: Not whether, but when.

The mighty wind of the Internet is a great leveling force, for both good and ill. But in too many cases, defenders of the status quo (lookin’ at you, RIAA) pretend that they can make that force go away, rather than dealing with it.

So far, the Internet is winning.