Buried by vacation emails? Don't read them, delete them, expert says

Some 601 emails greeted me when I returned from a week's vacation.

My first instinct was to select the whole lot of them and hit delete.

An Iowa State University professor argues I should do exactly that.

Rey Junco is an associate professor of education and human computer interaction. His background is in psychology and counseling, but he studies how people use technology and the social and psychological effects of a constantly connected society.

Twice a year, Junco takes a "technology sabbatical." He turns on an app on his smartphone that blocks his access to social media.

He sets an automatic reply on his email account warning anyone who emails him while he's away that he's not going to read their email when he returns.

"Is it really a break if you come back and have to reply to tons of messages?" Junco said. "You didn't take time off. You just delayed when you would do that work. A break — vacation, a sick day or whatever the reason — should be time off."

That sounds great in theory, but I can imagine my editor's head spinning around like Linda Blair in "The Exorcist" if I told him I'd just wiped out a week's worth of emails without a glance.

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So, I decided to study my inbox very carefully to see just how critical the communication I'd received in absentia was to getting back to work.

Some 601 unread emails greeted me when I returned to work after a week's vacation.

Of those, 273 were junk, stuff like "Did you see what Trump did today?" in the subject line.

There was a generous offer from a dying widow in the Ivory Coast. She wanted me to manage her $3.7-million estate, giving 85 percent of it to "poor aged widows" and keeping 15 percent, a cool $555,000, for myself.

I wrote back to renegotiate terms. My highly in-demand international financial management services are worth at least 40 percent.

Another 200 emails were the general clutter that goes along with being a journalist, particularly a former police reporter and night city editor. For example, I had week-old alerts for traffic accidents in the Council Bluffs area.

The remaining 128 messages broke down thusly:

• Twenty-two from our corporate tech support team letting the entire company know some piece of our tech infrastructure wasn't working, but their team was working on it.
• Twenty-one daily communications about the performance of various Des Moines Register stories, photo galleries and videos that were all published while I was away.
• Eighteen from various police agencies in the metro about serious crimes that the Register's capable breaking news team had already written about.
• Sixteen were announcements of meetings that were already over.
• Twelve alerted me to food in the newsroom that had long since been eaten.
• Twelve were newsroom-wide pleas for the various needs of the day, such as access to the Iowa Courts Online website or, in one odd case, a request for someone to drive a golf cart.
• One was a reader-submitted poem about the Drake Relays.
• One was an announcement that the Register now has a drone. (Plans to launch the first air strike on KCCI are pending.)

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• The remaining 32 messages were either personal communications, comments on columns that ran while I was away, story pitches or actual work that I needed to respond to.

Of 601 email, just more than 5 percent were of any value. It took me about two hours to sort through it all.

Junco, the ISU professor, argues I wasted that time.

"Email is not a terribly efficient form of communication," he said. "When everything is urgent, then nothing is."

It's sad, really. I remember life before email.

When I got my first email account in 1993, I loved being able to send messages instantly to friends and family.

I wrote whole letters and sent them off through my AOL account, which gave me 500 free hours on my 28.8 kbps dial-up modem.

Younger readers of the broadband generation, search Google for "dial-up modem" and "AOL." They were a big deal for dinosaurs like me.

By the time I graduated college, I figured out how to block my uncle because he forwarded so many jokes it overwhelmed my inbox.

Then came the age of spam — unsolicited junk email. Some 86 percent of the world's email traffic is spam, about 400 billion messages sent a day, according to a report by a research arm of Cisco Systems.

These days, I rely on text messages if I need to get something to a person in a hurry.

I've been known to text various spokespersons late Sundays with a list of requests for the following day. It's a wonder any of them speak to me at all.

And if all else fails, sometimes I use my smartphone to make an actual telephone call. It might seem archaic, but this 141-year-old technology can be a lot more efficient than most of the advances of the digital age.

Junco agrees.

"It seems counterintuitive, but a phone call allows you to communicate what you need and add the proper tone that's lost in electronic communication," he said.

Modern phones also have features that make telephones bliss for a guy like me, little additions such as silencing the ringer and blocking calls.

There's also my personal favorite: "Do not disturb."

Daniel P. Finney, the Register's Metro Voice columnist, is a Drake University alumnus who grew up in Winterset and east Des Moines. Reach him at 515-284-8144 or dafinney@dmreg.com. Twitter: @newsmanone.