Email Detox

Recently I read an article on one of my favorite websites, cnn.com, about a woman who decided to try stepping away from her email for a month. The article was called "Her 30 day email detox" and is funny (yet eerily truthful) to read. You can read the entire thing here: http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/02/06/o.30.day.email.detox/index.html

Unlike the woman who wrote the article, I don't find email to be stressful. Overwhelming? At times...but only if I've been away from it for awhile. In January I took a week-long vacation to Las Vegas and it was the first time I've ever gone that long without checking my email. It was nice but took me forever to catch up. Of course it doesn't help that I have a bazillion email addresses - my regular one, one for genealogy, one for work, one for a forum I belong to...the list goes on and on. Might not be so bad if I only had one to keep track of.

After reading the article I wondered if I could go 30 days without checking my email. Probably not. Oh believe me, I'd love to try but I'd probably regret it. Much like the author, I'm sure people would laugh at me if I said I wanted to try. After all, it IS my main method of communicating. Make a call...on the telephone? But why? lol I'm sure some people would think I'd dropped off the face of the earth if they didn't get an email from me. But then I think about all I could get done. I have hardly touched my genealogy research for the last two years. Have a to-do list with things on it from a couple years ago that I plan to get around to doing "some day when I have time" (yeah, don't laugh...you know you have a list like that too). Oddly enough, one thing on that list is to set up a new email address for my online bill-paying. Because Lord knows I need one more email address to check.

But alas, it's not gonna happen. There is no way I would willfully neglect my email for 3 days, let alone 30. I freak out every time I lose my internet connection ... who knows what important information I could miss during those 5 minutes!

And to think, once upon a time we all lived without email and BlackBerries and all the other gadgets that keep us connected every second of every day. How did we ever manage???