Chris writes a blog about email. I like it because it’s generally brief and thoughtful and often highlights the ways email stands out from the current batch of hijacked startup hellscapes. He also poses good questions.
His recent post on lingering emails had me looking at my inbox with renewed attention, because I am absolutely in this picture and I do not like it. My email service, Hey, has a couple handy containers for messages like these. There’s a Set Aside stack and a Reply Later stack and a Bubble Up stack, but they all tend to become graveyards for lingering emails over time.1
After conducting a brief and harrowing survey, here are the four main kinds of emails that linger in my inbox:
- Someone has taken the time to write me a kind and thoughtful email and I believe writing a worthy reply is going to involve significant time and emotional energy so I must hang onto it until those ideal conditions present themselves (otherwise known as “never”)
- Someone has emailed asking me for something that I know I need to say no to, but I hate disappointing people so I will solve the problem by saying nothing and feeling guilty about it until enough time has elapsed that the opportunity/obligation becomes irrelevant (feel a lot of shame about this one)
- Someone has sent me something I want to read/listen to/watch later (email-as-bookmark)
- Someone has made the mistake of including “How are you?” in their email which brings the chance of a reply down to zero because how can I possibly encapsulate what it’s like to be cleaning up literal human feces on a daily basis while also noticing birds and organizing mutual aid efforts and petting cats and kissing my dad on the head and growing wildflowers and trying, oh lord how I’m trying, to finish my graphic novel?
The oldest email currently sitting in my Set Aside pile is from December 17th 2020 (Matt’s lovely year-end recap. Given that I attended his actual IRL wedding last year, maybe the time for a reply has passed). The oldest one in the Reply Later pile is from September 3rd, 2020 (Tara recapping a rambling phone conversation we had about potential collaborations. Again, we have published not one, but two books together since then, so I think the intention of that email became reality with no help from my correspondence habits.).2
Looking at these feels a bit like revisiting old to-do lists and finding that somehow, magically, various items that felt looming at the time have just Gotten Done. I’m also struck by what a lovely feed it makes. Here are people who wrote replies to blog posts or newsletters or Patreon updates or comics. People who asked me whether I’d ever be reprinting my sparkly nautical temporary tattoos. People who offered their own caregiving stories. People who sent memories of my dad.
Are these really the messages I cast aside so I can pounce on contracts from shipping companies?
The latter are certainly more straightforward. They have urgency—an end point—whereas correspondence is just…ongoing. (How many times have I complained about finding replies-to-my-replies springing up like weeds the day after answering a bunch of old messages?) But I didn’t remember there being quite so many Emails from Humans in the lingering pile. That startled me.
My avoidance meant I hadn’t taken advantage of Chris’s idea that “maybe letting it sit there and having my brain re-visit it periodically is what it needs.” The stack of emails remained unopened. I became intimately familiar with the first two subject lines, but even they faded into blank mental space over time. I wasn’t giving myself a chance to ruminate.
Actually opening the stack and skimming its contents has generated a song: there are other humans out there. You’re all connected. You have found, and will continue to find each other.
And suddenly I’m thinking about a discussion point in Jocelyn’s course, CHANNEL, where she brought up an interview between Ezra Klein and Annie Murphy Paul. Paul is, in turn, talking about Andy Clark and the Extended Mind Theory and his belief that we are “intrinsically loopy creatures.”
Something about our biological intelligence benefits from being rotated in and out of internal and external modes of cognition, from being passed among brain, body, and world.
This is a loop! I’m looping back through my email and resurfacing things from long ago. How valuable! Remember what you cared about in 2020? There were so many threads floating through the air during that season. What do you notice, looking at them now, four years down the line?
This practice is definitely going in the “Synthesis” corner of this poster I made for myself back in 2023:
Thanks, Chris.
- Okay, actually the Bubble Up one is pretty good because it resurfaces emails when I need them and means they aren’t cluttering up the joint in the interim. ↩︎
- I only switched to using Hey in 2020. If this were my Gmail account the oldest messages would be even more ancient. I certainly didn’t start this habit during the Pandemic. ↩︎
