Divination by e-mail

“Show me your email and I will tell you who you are,” something like this is the message of Jeffrey Zaslow’s article “Your Mailbox is You,” published in the Wall Street Journal . According to the author’s deep conviction, the structure of an e-mail and order in it can tell a lot about a person’s habits, his mental state, and even how his mother and father raised him.

In fact, an indicator of a person’s condition can be any thing with which he interacts. What do you do with a paper cup, drink coffee - knead it? Do you send a kick to the far corner or gently send it to the garbage can? - What is not the soil for experiments? But scientists at the Center for the Study of Internet Behavior (Connecticut) deal with narrow subjects, drawing parallels exclusively between man and the phenomena of the electronic world.

“If you keep the box crammed, do not clean it, it means that you have a mess in other areas of life,” psychologist Dave Greenfield diagnosed mercilessly. “After all, there are a lot of unfinished business in your life?”
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On the other hand, if you are obsessed with checking your mail, coping with new arrivals every 10 minutes, you may have taken too quick a pace in life and miss opportunities that you simply did not have time to make out. It is also admissible that your participation is not enough for the family - after all, a hefty share of energy is spent on a passion for order.

Email dependency is a feature of advanced society. A small adrenaline rush, which happens when we are going to check e-mail or IM, was called the “incoming pulse”. Some of us immediately begin to sort out fresh correspondence, laying it out on special daddies, others - a sort of modern Scarlett O'Hara - tell themselves that they will think about it tomorrow. Best of all, those who are unaware that such things can be bother, but this group did not get into the attention of researchers.

Some relationships with electronic boxes acquire a somewhat clinical connotation. At least, this is how the relationship looks as interpreted by experts. Scott Stratten suffered from “post paralysis”: there were about 500 letters in the mailbox of this marketing consultant requiring an answer. "I had a tremendous sense of guilt, and I could not bring myself to even open the mail." In desperation, he deleted all the letters, sending messages to the contacts that his server did not miss part of the traffic. “People reacted to it sympathetically,” Scott says, “it allowed me to start anew.” At the same time, Scott is a conscientious person, he calls his act "a sin in its purest form." This gap in his biography was a turning point - Mr. Stratten thought that he had to find the best way to get rid of the feeling of guilt, and now he is looking for an assistant who will handle his mail.

“Postal ping-pong” is a great name for the scourge that mostly shy people suffer from. They consider it their duty to maintain an exhausting dialogue with chatty acquaintances. This is not always easy, but often there is simply not enough spirit to leave a message unanswered.

Those who have studied the question insist that it is necessary to cultivate rigidity in oneself. One researcher says that he uses patterns that he has about a dozen for answers. According to him, the “Inbox” folder should be treated as a home mailbox - remove all garbage from there.

Wally Bock, an online consultant from North Carolina, addresses people with a set of “zero inbound”: “It’s wrong to perform several tasks at the same time. If you constantly switch from one to another, then you lose a lot of time, because you need to re-concentrate, delve into. During the day, a huge share of efficiency is lost. ”

The described issues are devoted to the book: “Email Management. Thinking outside the Inbox ”is the name of one of them, written by Christina Kavanaf. Before getting to work, Christine interviewed hundreds of office workers. Some of them, for example, had about 10 thousand messages in the mail - this mass, according to researchers, is already critical, and the load from the soul can be removed only by deleting it. In another way - to make "euthanasia."

At the same time, there is no single method for managing the Inbox - we are all different, experts say. But they believe that understanding your “postal behavior” will help you better understand other things in life.