Email Bankruptcy

Stan­ford law prof Lawrence Lessig has declared email bank­rupt­cy.

In a script-dri­ven note sent out last week, Lessig wrote: “Dear per­son who sent me a yet-unan­swered e‑mail, I apol­o­gize, but I am declar­ing e‑mail bank­rupt­cy.”

He went on to note that he had spent 80 hours the pri­or week sort­ing through unan­swered e‑mail built up since Jan­u­ary 2002, and had deter­mined that “with­out extra­or­di­nary effort” he would sim­ply nev­er be able to respond to these mes­sages.

Evi­dent­ly he gets an aver­age of 200 non-spam emails a day. I have to say that makes me feel bet­ter about my own email inad­e­qua­cies. My next three days will be chiefly com­prised of a con­cert­ed effort to whit­tle down my inbox. I start­ed this morn­ing at 387 non-spam, non-newslet­ter emails. I end today at 347. It does­n’t look like much progress, but I had two hour long phone con­ver­sa­tions and a bunch itty-bit­ty ones that kept me from the com­put­er most of today.

My goal for tomor­row is to get my inbox down to 200…

0 thoughts on “Email Bankruptcy”

Leave a Reply