My email policy can be nicely summed up in one sentence:

 I actively work to minimize the number of times I respond to unsolicited email.

I develop, maintain, and refine this discipline based on my definition of and commitment to my own professionalism. Let me explain.

Starting in 2003 and continuing through present day, I have spent a ton of time crafting a compelling vision for my professional work. As part of this vision, I have articulated a set of values that inform how I choose to realize this vision in my daily life. Interested readers can find more about my values and vision on my professional vision statement page.

My work towards turning my professional vision into reality is challenging, demanding, time-consuming, and extremely fulfilling. To do so, I find that I must invest a huge amount of quiet time learning and thinking deeply about mathematics and the US higher education system. I also work hard to build and maintain meaningful relationships in my community so that I may be of service to the people with whom I work. 

However, in the tens of thousands of emails I have received and thousands of emails that I have sent, I notice a few trends emerge.

First, I use email to avoid hard work. Because I get a rush of endorphins when I accomplish items on my to-do list, I tend to misrepresent clearing my email inbox with the type of productivity that I want to maintain in my work life. When I make a commitment to respond to every email that I receive, I end up spending a huge portion of my daily work life dealing with email.

On any given day, this doesn’t cause me much of a problem. But, over larger time scales (i.e. a month, a year, a decade, etc.), I find I can quickly loose focus. By developing my discipline to be highly selective in the way I use email, I stay much more focused on the type of deep work that I value. Doing so leads me to realize daily progress on major problems I want to solve.

A second trend that I notice is that I often allow myself to use email as a proxy for effective interpersonal communication. When I hold open the thought that I can contact my students or colleagues any time I want via email, I am much less intentional about how I spend my time with these people when we are face-to-face.

A great example of this phenomenon happens when I try to schedule a meeting with someone else. I cannot count the number of times I have sent meeting requests to people via email. Inevitably, my free times don’t line up with available times that the receiver provides. Because of the challenges of scheduling, I end up in a long email chain negotiating a good meeting time. This leads to an open loop that can last hours or days depending on how busy we both are.

However, the exact same conversation might last no more than 5 minutes when I am face-to-face with this person. Primarily because face-to-face conversations are synchronous, we can both converge on a good meeting time and hash out details together. Other examples abound.

My major realization is that when I limit the way I use email, I tend to develop a host of strategies for making my face-to-face meetings with people more meaningful. This, I feel, is a noble goal and one that I strive to achieve each day.

Yet a third trend that I notice is that many of my students and colleagues are much more responsive to text messages than they are with email. I think this is because, for most of us, it is much easier to read, send, and correspond via text messages than via email. Email systems pre-date text messaging and were designed in a much-less-connected world. I do believe that email serves a purpose. If I need to share files or work on nonurgent projects over a long period of time with a trusted team of people, email is my tool of choice. But for urgent communications, community building, and many other aspects in my job as an educator, I find text messaging to be a much more effective mode of communication.

I am aware that my approach to email is nonstandard. However, I also know that I am not the only working professional that has struggled with this issue. In fact, I maintain a collection of (what I would call) email philosophy statements that make me think. You can find these below:

Donald Knuth versus Email by Donald Knuth
Email is Evil by Sanjiv Ranjan Das
Is Email Making Professors Stupid by Cal Newport
A World without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Last Updated: Tuesday 9/17/2019 at 1:53pm