EmailEmailEmailEmailEmail

I check my email a lot.

If you send me something at work, I see it somewhere between immediately and an hour later (generally much closer to the former, unless I’m in a meeting or at lunch). Outside work, unless I’m traveling (or sleeping), a message still won’t usually sit any longer than an hour without me seeing it.

And that is enough, dammit.

All you BlackBerry-totin’ folks kill me. The service is down for three hours, and it’s the end times. What are you really doing that necessitates ubiquitous, immediate email? How much more effective are you, answering an email minutes sooner than you would have been able to without that thing on your hip?

Do you even like it? Or have you ever considered that question? Does your employer require it? Really? Did you ask? How many jobs genuinely require that level of connectivity? For how many jobs is “an hour or less” too large a window for email response? I’m certain it’s a much smaller number than the number of those things I see.

Financial markets? OK, fine, but most of those folks are in front of a computer, are they not? How many of them need to move around frequently and be connected?

When it comes to gadgets, I am 99th-percentile nerdy. I’m probably 99.9th-percentile nerdy. The chance of you knowing someone else who is nerdier in this particular regard is essentially nil. I could tell you how many batteries and LCD displays I own, and you wouldn’t believe it. (It would probably take me most of a day to count them, actually.) I love them.

Yet I am actively headed the other way on this hyperconnectivity epidemic. Not only am I never carrying one of those damned omnionline devices, I’m seriously considering completely unplugging myself from the net one day a week (probably Sunday).

I have a fairly standard white-collar professional’s schedule and habits, I think, and I mentioned above how quickly I’m able to read email. If you carry a BlackBerry and you truly believe that your job performance would suffer significantly without it, I want to hear from you. If you’re really that damned indispensable, cure my ignorance.

‘Cause I don’t think there are many of you at all.

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