Are You Drowning in the Information Glut of the Internet Ocean? Here's a Life Preserver.

Learn to use e-mail (and other technology) far more sparingly and with far less dependency. Don’t and you risk losing control of your life, emotional and physical burnout, workplace meltdowns, and unhappiness.

That’s the argument John Freeman makes in his new book,
The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox (to be published in October by Scribner). Freeman is also the editor of Granta Magazine. Here are some his thoughts as expressed in a recent Wall Street Journal article titled Not So Fast.

Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.

The breakdown of the barrier between our work and personal lives has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise.

Speed is not always better. [We could travel faster on highways or play music faster than it was recorded. But we don't.] How fast we do things changes how we experience it. Words and communication are not immune to this fundamental truth. The faster we talk and chat and type over tools such as email and text messages, the more our communication will resemble traveling at great speed. We will live in a constant state of digital jet lag.

Brain science may suggest that some decisions can be made in the blink of an eye, but not all judgments benefit from a short frame of reference. We need to protect the finite well of our attention if we care about our relationships. We need time in order to properly consider the effect of what we say upon others. We need time in order to grasp the political and professional ramifications of our typed correspondence. We need time to shape and design and filter our words so that we say exactly what we mean. Communicating at great haste hones our utterances down to instincts and impulses that until now have been held back or channeled more carefully.

Continuing in this strobe-lit techno-rave communication environment as it stands will be destructive for businesses. Employees communicating at breakneck speed make mistakes. They forget, cross boundaries that exist for a reason, make sloppy errors, offend clients, spread rumors and gossip that would never travel through offline channels, work well past the point where their contributions are helpful, burn out and break down and then have trouble shutting down and recuperating.

We need context in order to live, and if the environment of electronic communication has stopped providing it, we shouldn’t search online for a solution but turn back to the real world and slow down. To do this, we need to uncouple our idea of progress from speed, separate the idea of speed from efficiency, pause and step back enough to realize that efficiency may be good for business and governments but does not always lead to mindfulness and sustainable, rewarding relationships. We are here for a short time on this planet, and reacting to demands on our time by simply speeding up has canceled out many of the benefits of the Internet, which is one of the most fabulous technological inventions ever conceived. We are connected, yes, but we were before, only by gossamer threads that worked more slowly. Slow communication will preserve these threads and our ability to sensibly choose to use faster modes when necessary. It will also preserve our sanity, our families, our relationships and our ability to find happiness in a world where, in spite of the Internet, saying what we mean is as hard as it ever was. It starts with a simple instruction: Don’t send.

Final Thoughts

I admit it. I constantly struggle with the desire for more information and a constant nagging feeling that there must be a better way to filter out all the noise so I can find the important. I spend too much time doing that filtering. Social networking (not the Facebook kind) was supposed to fill that need by allowing the ‘mind of the collective’ to cause the truly important to rise to the surface. I’m not sure it’s working quite like it was supposed to.

While I don’t agree with all the Freeman says, there is a thread of truth in his passionate plea that we not drown in the ocean of information that seeks to fill our lives and that will lure us into a world that will drown us if we let it.

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3. 10 Tips to Get More Out of Meetings and to Make Them More Effective
4. Keeping Track of Yourself on the Internet – The Starting Point of Personal Branding
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