Email: Blessing AND Curse

Email is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because we have much faster access to information as communication than ever before. Email is a quantum leap forward in technology from the fax machine.

However, like all technologies, it’s a mixed blessing. Unless one uses email with considerable self-discipline, it can become a tyrant in one’s life. Email comes to you so fast and in such volume that you have no time for reflection and contemplation in considering your response to correspondence unless you deliberately slow the process down and with conscious action make time to THINK.

In other words, you must set the pace with which you read and respond to email. Otherwise, email becomes master and you the servant, instead of the other way around. Unless we cultivate time for reflection it will be eaten up by email.

One test of whatever you or email is master: Can you “unplug” for a morning, for an afternoon—dare we say—a whole working day?

By Richard Land  |  March 13, 2008; 5:43 PM ET
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