Email is one of those mediums of communication we use every day. Tim Challies has some provoking thoughts on the matter. It also reminds me of a post I read on email not all that long ago that spoke of email etiquette. I learned a lot from the email etiquette post. That is why I’m no longer sending an email that simply says “thanks” anymore.
I am sure I don’t get nearly the amount of email most people get, but I know that yesterday I received around 100 messages and sent about 60. One way I use email and my inbox is to treat my inbox as a to-do list. So if there are 15 items in the inbox then I probably have at least 15 things that I need to give attention to at one point or another during the day or week.
One of the things Tim said should be the obvious to so many of us:
Today we receive mail in our inboxes instead of our mailboxes. They take a few seconds in transit instead of a few days or a few weeks. They consume no resources other than the few seconds it takes to type them out. With a click of a button we can send that same email to hundreds of other people, making each person believe that we have sent it only to him. This is the new paradigm: quantity over quality, immediacy over thoughtfulness, amusement over significance.
