Declaring e-mail bankruptcy is often a guilt ridden process. You were important enough, or your thoughts were considered important enough for all of these people to send you a message, and a large percentage of us feel that it is important to respond to each message.
I currently have [n] messages within my in-box. If I do nothing except read each message, and reply it will take me [n/20] hours of time to do that if I presume that a reasonable amount of time to devote to that process is 5 minutes per message. This amounts to [n/480] days of my time. During which time I can reasonably expect to receive [n(1) = messages received yesterday] new messages, including responses to the messages I’ve sent out. That is also time that I can not eat, sleep or spend time with family or friends. If I simply devote 2 hours per day to nothing but responding to e-mail messages, I can personally expect to processing approximately 40 messages a day. You may see a bit of an issue here. I know that I see a growing issue, and need to address that issue now.
While there are be many messages that I would briefly look at and dispose of, some messages will require additional research and may skew the average time per message significantly longer. The thing is that I am already filtering out a number of messages that fall into the category of ‘I’ll spend less than a minute on this’ which means that 40 messages is a very optimistic estimate.
I hereby declare e-mail bankruptcy. I am notifying you because you are one of the senders of the [n] messages I have not otherwise been able to get to, and I want you to know that I was not able to get to it, and will not be reviewing or responding to your message otherwise. If you sent me a message that still requires my attention, I will be happy to re-receive and respond in the future.
Thank you,
