Of Inboxes

We're doomed.

Past generations were promised flying cars.

We have email (1).

I don't know about you, but my email is a mess. I get more stuff from more corners of the digital world than I knew existed. I think there's even Martian mail in there -- and I don't mean the stuff Elon might be sending, asking for Space-X subsidies. That dropped way off after he Doge'd his way into my intestines and rid himself of all those annoying USAID inquiries and whatever else he chainsawed in the name of efficiency (i.e., things regulating his business) (2).

Citizens United did me no favors, either. I can scarcely take a breath before some bot sends me a breathless email that says that if I don't send a dollar, the world will end yet again, either due to climate change or right to choose or for-profit "solutions" for things that really shouldn't be for-profit (3) -- all this if I don't send some money to so-and-so's campaign. Increasingly, these campaigns are from states farther and farther from my own. Plus every charity lets me know why THEIR suffering, dewy-eyed representative is more deserving then the next one's. I will say, however, that charities are good for my increasingly senile brain, since they send me annual renewal notices a couple of months after I've renewed, just to test my memory: "What, wait! Didn't I…?"

When I worked full time, it was less about the above nonsense and all about the breathless transactional stuff that constitutes daily working life. Like the latest announcement from HR, sporting stentorian demands that you comply with some Important Policy; or a note from Finance requiring that you examine the length and breadth of the entire organization in the next few hours, looking for oversized butts in seats, or boots on the ground in the wrong war, or capital items requested but not approved (4); or some random vendor ad purporting to solve a problem you didn't even know you had; or the latest intramural conflict between warring departments (5); or a meeting notice that steps on the meeting notice you just accepted after pushing aside the other meeting notice that got in the way (6); or the latest directive from cyber security that claims you're about to die if you aren't careful about which link you click; or the reports, free e-books solving whatever problem you may have, if you'll just sign away your email and give up your digital soul to obtain a 50-page document you're not going to read, anyway, because you have too much email to get through.

By the way, did you know you can do DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) through ordinary email? DDOS is where cyber attackers flood (and eventually overwhelm) computers with a barrage of messages from various sources. Sound familiar? Here's a great example. If you figure out how to replicate this across an organization (or a nation-state, come to think of it), you'll bring it to its knees. It's very simple. Ask ten managers where they think the next team lunch should be, and don't disable the "Reply All" button. That's a guaranteed 100 to 1 message ratio, and that's before they start arguing and possibly even igniting one of those intramural conflicts.

Well, now.

I'm so old I remember a time before email. (This is like my grandparents remembering a time before cars.)

When I was a pre-teen, Mom worked for one of the highly-ranked Ford finance guys. A Controller, to use a term both authoritative and laughable: name me an organization that is actually in control. This is back when you had a physical inbox. For those under forty, let me explain. Look up from your latest Tik-Tok a minute.

A physical inbox came in a couple of variations. One was the stacking kind. One was the side-by-side kind. Both of them were actually inboxes and outboxes. Side by sides had the inbox next to the outbox; stackers had the inbox on top. In the days when there were a lot more secretaries (now we call them admins, and they've been steadily going extinct due to automation (ineffective and dangerous) and self-management (worse still)), the secretary would take the Urgent Matters Of the Day (always in paper form) and place them in the inbox, picking up the Wise Decisions from the outbox.

In theory.

Way back then, people being people and Important People being those whom you pester with everything, inboxes had a way of becoming way overcrowded. You could have an inbox piled with a ziggurat of forms and letters and memos, all demanding action.

This, by the way, is the inevitable consequence of running a firm that reaches a certain size or maturity. There are two ways to run these things. The first is the zany, infectious, feverish, oh-gosh-aren't-we-brilliant mode, often known as the startup. This is the laissez-faire method: hands off, get out of the way, we'll just outrun the risks and spend whatever we need, the product's the thing, we're out in front and intend to stay there. This is the "spreading dandelion" time for the firm -- markets are growing, revenues zooming, yellow heads popping up all over the place. The second way begins to take hold the minute all this zaniness runs into lawsuits, customers with pitchforks, politicians who haven't been paid off, or (inevitably) employees making Silly Demands (a living wage, say), doing Stupid Things, or going off on Frolics of Their Own (7). By now, the dandelion heads have turned white and ugly, and the firm is burdened by a whole bunch of people running around spraying weed control (8).

All of this gives rise to PSPC (Policies, Standards, Procedures and Controls) -- and these give rise to Forms Needing Signature, Letters Needing Approval, Applicants Needing Review, Idiots Needing Firing, Reports Needing Reading, Directives Needing Issuance and so on.

All of these Needings end up in a busy executive's inbox.

It was as true in Mom's day as it is now. One day long ago, she was carrying a stack of Needings to put on top of the teetering stack on her boss's desk. Balancing it carefully, she asked, "How do you manage all this?"

He looked at it and smiled. "It manages itself," he said.

There's the trick.

You don't get to be a top executive, or even a functioning manager, without managing your inbox. This guy knew that the truly important stuff would eventually be accompanied by a phone call ("Did you have a chance to look at…") or even an office visit (implied: "I'm not leaving until you…"). Then, because this Needing was particularly important, it might be reviewed -- on the second or third go-round.

There was another variation which I thought was wonderfully colorful, relayed to me midway through my career. This involved a purchasing manager. As you can imagine, purchasing manager's inboxes are weighed down with, well, purchase orders. These are Needings from all over the place, and the purchasing manager has no way to know which Most Important Needing (yours, of course) is truly most important.

This particular purchasing manager had a reputation for touchiness. He'd get to things when he got to them. He was a Busy Man. If you decided (idiot that you were) to enquire about the status of your Needing, his response was always the same: "I want you to know that your purchase order is so important, I've put it on the top of my inbox. And I want you also to know that I work my inbox from the bottom up."

The point of all this tomfoolery is simple.

It doesn't matter that we have electronic, or even AI-managed inboxes. The truth is, we all have them. And they extend far beyond the contours of what we encounter at work or in our personal email accounts. Life is full of inboxes. Needings. Things craving attention.

The Internet is a battleground of Needings. It is an out-of-control marketplace for everything -- and this is just the surface web, not the Deep or Dark web, kids. No. Most of us swim on the surface of the pool and really don't want to think about that which accumulates around the filters at the bottom.

Needings include social media rants, political statements, advertising for whatever you last did a search on, news of the day, video shorts, pundits, this essay. The clamoring is incessant. Nicholas Carr warned of this in "The Shallows" -- that the Internet, with its constant flash of Read This! No, stop reading that and Read This Too! erodes our ability to consider that which we've read before moving on to something else. It withers our judgment, to the point where we now accept foreign policy via tweet. Bruce Schneier called the Internet a vast interruption service. Shoshana Zuboff excoriated it in "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism." All true, sadly -- if only because the other side of the coin is where all the promise continues to beckon. There are great things being done in this space as well.

It is both old and new, now -- this giant beast of information, teeming with wisdom, rantings (such as this) and AI slop. We can't remember that calm time before its dominance. It is that which we can barely live with, yet cannot imagine living without. It is the giant digital Inbox of our lives.

There's more, though, as any parent, eldercare giver, or person managing someone with one of life's challenges (disability, disease, addiction) -- indeed, as anyone who's balancing a multitude of Needings -- knows. There are soccer schedules, music lessons, health care checkups, school evaluations, elder care patient advocacy, bills, maintenance schedules, upkeep -- all the stuff of life that both is, yet can intrude upon, life with a capital L. That is to say, the Life we yearn to live for, sacrificed so often in favor of the life we live through.

We all have multiple inboxes. I don't know if we can be effective letting them "manage themselves." We certainly can't just take what's on the bottom, move it to the top, and then work from the bottom up. But managing our inboxes is vital for our own mental -- and physical -- health. I offer no quick solutions, no gentle turn of phrase to help or heal. Everyone's situation is parodoxically unique, yet the same. I'm in the same place as anyone else. What I have at this stage of life is a massive gift -- the time to reflect, to walk in the woods, where the cycles are different, urgent in their own way, but timeless too.

Maybe the best gift we can give ourselves is to turn away from our many inboxes from time to time, centering ourselves, breathing deeply, resting. They will always be there, these stacks of Needings. We can return to them later. When we're ready.

FOOTNOTES AND BUSINESS-RELATED ARCHEOLOGICAL DIGS

(1) And PowerPoint, too. For visioning, you're better off having a stash of cocktail napkins. That way, when you have an inspirational idea, you can jot it down on a cocktail napkin -- a far better solution than firing up ol' PPT and wading through choices of boxes, shadows, fills, lines, arrows, and other assorted digital nonsense, all designed to rob you of whatever inspiration you had, your mind now focused on the minutiae of fonts and reflections like, "To Bevel, or Not To Bevel? That is the Question." By the time you're, say, 25 percent into your presentation, your inspiration has been replaced by Arial or Times New Roman. Oh, I know, there's AI. So all this may go away. I say this as though AI has human agency. Wait, what? It doesn't?

(2) For one thing, keep an eye on the Ebola outbreaks and the recent increase in violence in Africa. Here's a source, which will be pooh-poohed by those who distrust any type of science:  https://apnews.com/article/africa-usaid-conflict-crisis-0d49ccd215724e783b920bb5e7e92285

(3) Healthcare and prisons, for example, if you have to ask. We ought to get a little antsy if our well-being is sacrificed in order to increase the sale of drugs, or needed interventions are denied because some insurance algorithm has decided it's not worth it or a profit target isn't being met. Oh, and if you're running a prison for profit, you have two things that are paramount: a fresh supply of raw materials (mostly Black), and methods to keep costs down. Recidivism is actually good for your business model. Seems we really like the workaround to the 13th Amendment. (Remember? "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted…")

(4) Where I worked, they called this assignment a "task." Others have referred to it as "taking a haircut," which is a strange phrase, because what you're doing to please Finance is taking an entire body cut. And (as I've argued elsewhere), the notion that you can indiscriminately trim 10% from every department across the board and somehow be operating more effectively is just, well, ludicrous. To make matters worse, Finance would refer to money not spent or initiatives not started or people laid off as "good news;" which is to say, good for them and bad for business operations or innovation. If you want to know where fraud gets its start, look no further than the budgeting process in any organization. Talk about a bizarre industrial poker game: you pad the budget with some kind of fluff that you can later sacrifice when Finance comes snooping around, giving up something you never really needed in the first place. And that's another thing. You'd go through this entire ridiculously difficult process of getting approval for something you really needed, which gets it into the budget for the year, and then when you go to spend it, you have to get approval for the spend all over again. Has anyone ever totted up the cost associated with doing business this way, against the savings generated by creating all these hoops to jump through?

‍(5) I used to do a whole spiel on this. These are generally long and convoluted strings of grievances, consuming whole acres of disk space on servers everywhere, demonstrating over and over that it's far better to pick up the phone or Zoom or Teams or anything that gets you face-to-face in a conversation that cuts through all this nonsense in about 15 minutes.

(6) See the end of the Footnote 4. We did away with secretaries and admins (unless you make more money than God), forcing all of us to manage our own calendars -- a business capability that's as much a mirage for any of us as is that beautiful watering hole in the Sahara. Nobody can manage calendars. They're the ultimate reason behind high blood pressure in office workers -- worse than sitting through stupid meetings, enduring yet another team-building event, or trying to make sense out of what the IT or cybersecurity guys are asking you to do. "Manage stress" to control your high blood pressure, the doctors say. Piffle.

(7) This is actually cross-linked from the "Scorched Squirrels" adventure, so if you read it there you can skip it here. "A frolic of his own" is a term used to defend a firm from the illegal antics of its employees. More from "Squirrel (9)":  ‍Also the title of a book by William Gaddis. A Frolic of His Own boasts what (IMHO) is one of the best opening lines in literature: "Justice -- You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law." Gaddis, by the way, is so brilliant he's generally unreadable for mere mortals (I'm one of them). If you try, you'd do well to have a link to The Gaddis Annotations at your elbow, as in: http://www.williamgaddis.org/frolic/index.shtml

‍‍(8) This is Risk Debt, by the way, and it's every bit as prevalent, persistent, and pernicious as its more glamorous cousin, Technical Debt. Risk Debt is not to be confused with debt risk - the financial risk of defaulting on a loan. I use Risk Debt to define that which accumulates, like arterial plaque, inside an organization. It's a defense mechanism to reduce or eliminate the consequences of outside attacks -- regulations, consumer lawsuits, cyber attacks, etc. (This is not to be misconstrued as some kind of statement that All Regulations Are Evil. That's like saying All Consumers Are Evil. The only place Consumers Are Evil makes sense is if you're in a Satanic business.)

To address the attacks, firms put in controls. These are effective, mostly. Then, inevitably, somebody does Something Stupid. No attack, just, say, accidentally spending $100 million the firm doesn't have. So the answer is more controls. The problem with controls is, they generally mature into tomes known as policy manuals, which used to weigh a couple of hundred pounds and contained in them things designed to Make Sure Something Like This Doesn't Happen Again. The problem with those particular controls is, they don't get reviewed and removed when the Something Like This becomes an impossibility, due to changing business conditions.

‍‍Hence, accumulated Risk Debt -- extra weight holding the firm down as it tries to pivot or relaunch. This leads to streamlining exercises, which often leads to finance haircuts (see footnote 4), which is about as effective as a haircut can be when what you're trying to do is cure acne. That is to say, the underlying condition still exists, costs remain stubbornly high, and the existing management team, befuddled, fades into retirement, to be replaced by younger and wiser folks who will try to do this all over again. This is called the Grand Business Cycle, and those trapped within it run the real risk of cycling themselves into extinction.

‍ ‍