Half lives

In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock the protagonist declares:

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

The poem is a tour through the inner workings of Mr Prufrock's mind, as he wrestles with a decision, a decision unarticulated.  Whether or not you are, have been or ever possibly can be a middle-aged man I am certain that the poem will have cognitive resonances for all.

One of my conceits is to fondly imagine that there was once a time when internal rumination was distinctly separated from articulate thought by the act of writing.  The written piece may be for direct consumption, or a plan for a spoken presentation, but the act forced a certain coherence and logical direction, turning rumination into useful prose.  I suppose that T.S. Eliot and James Joyce slightly ruined this for the wider world, although as a behavioural scientist I can interpret their outputs as data, as a representation of thought.  But, whatever their role, my imagined idyll is firmly historic: modern technology has intervened.

I write many emails each week.  Some are quick messages to colleagues, updating them or asking for a favour; others are longer missives, structured more like a letter, in which I outline an idea or suggested action.  In turn I receive many emails.  Many of them fall into the two preceding categories, and have some literary merit.

There is a third type, which I term Prufrockian.  They come in clusters or spread out over the day, each individual email making little sense, but when taken as a whole it is apparent that the author is actively trying to think a problem through.  Each message is a tiny chunk of a fuller idea that is forming on the scrolling screen.  Mail clients that collect messages into threads are extremely useful here as they aggregate the developing notion without any need for administrative intervention.  After a decent interval, when the thread seems spent, you can simply read the final message.  If that is impenetrable one can look at the penultimate message and so on.  It is rare that all of the emails need to be read.  In a previous job a senior administrator was infamous for her Prufrockian emails.  She would send at least 20 messages on one topic across a day, each one correcting or adjusting something in the previous, until eventually she hit upon just what it was she was trying to say.  The advice was to wait.  You could be even more bold and happily delete unread, until around 5pm.  There was no information loss.

All emails, but especially short ones, can also be understood as work in their own right.  Something needs doing, you have isolated what that thing is and then you send an email to the person you think should do it, or who can enact it.  In your view that is the job done.  It can be crossed off on your pulsating Reminders list.  But in complex organizations, such as a university, all tasks require more coordination than this.  Yet, in my experience most of my incoming email is of this order.  Given that someone is unlikely to send an email to alert you to a fire, or a deadline that is coming up within 24 hours, all such messages can be deleted.  The signal will either be repeated a few times, prompting investigation and action, or the author will eventually phone you, or knock on your office door - which, after all, is only two yards away.  If they were emailing about a fire or close deadline, they are a fool.

If not a fool then possibly such a person is branding themselves.  I have noted that many people sit on the tube composing multiple short emails that they send as soon as the train surfaces.  Their writing is accompanied by somewhat histrionic gestures and facial expressions, indicating the melodrama of their work life.  Look how much I have to do!  My informational throughput extends even to my commute - the interstices of my life are not my own.  I am important.  In these cases I doubt that they wish to achieve anything more than their presence in crucial inboxes and a distinct social signal.  Indeed, the recipient of one such hastily crafted missive may be the CEO of the company.  She will never read this email, but the underling can say, "you'll see I emailed you about this early this morning," and the CEO will register the investment and have an administrator audit the action of send and received.  The content will be ignored.  If there was any.

Prufrockian threads and emails-as-work have rapidly diminishing utility.  The majority of the former contain little to no information, and the eventual idea conveyed is unlikely to be well worked through.  The latter only have utility as an index that something is coming your way in the near future.  To this end most emails slip into entropy at a rapid rate.  Their role in maintaining some structural integrity in your life diminishes exponentially.  Emails have a half life.  

I measure out my life with emails

I awake, struggle with the meaning of existence for a few seconds, have a coffee and then look at my emails.  For the most part this is to delete and tidy, to sift for the odd important message and calculate the half-life of my inbox: when can I expect a knock at the door?  Do I have time to do what I want to today? This process is repeated throughout the day at my desk and on my phone as a I travel to and from meetings. The regular ping of messages is my timepiece, measuring my span with the deteriorating content of my correspondence.