Mom’s Rules for Email

Taylor Buzzard over at Buzzard Blog has a post on Phone vs. Email. She argues it’s easier to deal with the phone than with email. Her most compelling comment:

“The phone is much better suited to my lifestyle these days. It allows me to communicate with someone, while still looking at my children, physically interacting with them, and turning my body towards them. Email is like a dark cave that requires me to dive in, whereas the telephone allows me to stay at sea level and multitask.”

I think she’s on target and yet misses the target. Her best line – “Email is like a dark cave that requires me to dive in.” True, email sucks you in, requires full concentration (even if you think you’re a multi-tasker – you’re not), is socially isolating, limiting in that you can’t hear the tone of voice, the pace of the conversation, the ambient noise of, “I’m writing this in a room full of screaming children.”

Where Buzzard misses the target for me is thinking she can talk on the phone, “while still looking at my children, physically interacting with them, and turning my body towards them.” From my experience children and even my dogs are smarter than this. They know innately when they’re not getting my full-attention. Body language, hand-motions, the evil eye or even patting them on the back doesn’t fool their radar. Likewise the person on the other end of the line somehow knows they are not getting my full-attention. Don’t you know when someone is browsing the internet while talking with you even if you can’t hear the key-clicks? Same-thing, but children are even more attuned.

My Mom rules for email (and I think it works for Dads too):

• Only enter the “dark cave” of email when children are playing, sleeping, with Dad or happily occupied
• Never check email when you are actively parenting – turn off the bing-bing sound. It is a “siren” call that will suck you in.
• Use a screensaver so that as you walk by the computer you don’t see that HUGE number indicating the number of unread emails.
• Set up a GTD type email system that allows you to quickly file emails into Hold, Action, Quick Response, Respond, Archive boxes (these are the boxes I use). You sort through these later when you really have time.

and I’ve saved the best for last

• NEVER respond to an email in less than 3-5 hours, even if it comes in while you are processing email. It’s important that your email friends know you NEVER respond quickly. That way they know that if it is urgent, a quick question that needs a quick answer or a simple reply to a long-chain of back and forths, they know to just pick up the phone and “leave it on voicemail” – because you NEVER answer the phone either!

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Tagged as: Computer, Parenting, technology