I've been blogging for over six years now, working 12-16 hour days for many of those years and I've loved almost every part of the gig. That is up until the last six months or so. My email Inbox has been insane for I'd say five years now. At times I must receive one every 20 seconds when it's a hectic news day. I have to turn that around because emails have been so valuable to me personally and to the site. Not only do I receive great tips from readers on things I may not have seen, I do get interview requests and transcripts sent from the various shows via email along with everything else you can imagine. I like to respond to my readers as much as possible, but with the volume of emails that's almost impossible now. Please keep sending them. I plan on doing some meditation on this issue over the holidays.
I Don’t Want To Be Your Friend
Nor will I even bother to open an email without a subject line.OK, in fairness, I don’t use communications in general the way the 20-somethings (or less!) Facebook is trying to cultivate do; even with actual friends, my messages are more along the lines of “are you free for dinner next Friday?” than “Hey, I’m around, wanna meet up?”
Still, at the risk of sounding like an old fuddy-duddy (after all, I am an old fuddy-duddy), there are very real virtues to old-fashioned email. You can convey a lot of information, if necessary — and it’s information that stays available in the archive. Plus, the lack of immediacy is, given the way I live, a virtue. In general, I can’t break what I’m doing to talk to you or text you; so an asynchronous form of communication, which I can respond to when convenient, is a huge advantage...read on
When you do email myself or anyone else at C&L, please make sure you have a good subject line. If it's in reference to a story published elswhere then please make sure you link to the article or video and include some of the text. I usually delete anything that only has a link with no explanation. How do you handle your Inbox? I understand my Inbox isn't normal. Are you leaving emails in the dust or just incorporating them into your vast reservoir of technological linkage tools?
