Dammit Wednesday: E-Mail

Until just recently I’ve never thought of e-mail as anything more than a means of receiving a few messages from family and friends, and perhaps a newsletter or two. As you could imagine, E-mail is HUGE in the business world, it blows my mind every day when I look at all of the messages I receive for work. My Outlook and BlackBerry are going off constantly with ticket updates, alarms, memos, newsletters, forwards from co-workers, it’s freakin’ endless. I tried to count how many e-mails I received yesterday alone and it’s easily pushing 200 messages, 70% of which get deleted off the bat, others are filed away for later and a handful I need to get replies out to right away.

Staying on top of all this e-mail is something I’m slowly getting used to, if I ignore them even for a little while it gets out of hand quick. I’ve already ran into a couple instances when I deleted messages that I should have held on to and completely lost others just because they get buried under the little alerts and ticket updates I get every few minutes. But why does e-mail warrant its own Dammit Wednesday? Well, it’s annoying. E-mail has become both a part and a nuisance of every day life. I remember when e-mail used to be fun and informative, now it just gives me more work to do. It doesn’t matter if your organize it, move it around, set up rules and put it into folders, send it off to others, if you work in an office e-mail will inevitably become your worst enemy.