My Unread Emails Make Me Feel Like a Failure

Every day I face a battle with my inbox
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1,782. That's the number of unread emails currently sitting in my inbox.

Are you appalled? Did you just gasp? Based on the number of times a friend or acquaintance has glanced at my phone and seen my inbox and said something like "How do you LIVE like that?" I'm wagering that several of you probably did make some kind of judgment. And I judge myself, too. If I dwell on it, the ever-increasing number starts to correlate inversely to my sense of productivity and worth; the more it grows, the lesser I feel. It starts to become a symbol of my self-perceived incompetence.

There's a popular meme, you've probably seen it, that shows two email inboxes side by side. One inbox is tidily empty: zero unread. The other shows 13,678 unread emails. "There are two types of people in this world," the meme reads. I know where I fall.

I could attempt to explain away my number—I'm still digging out from taking a few days off; I get, on average, between 400 and 600 emails per day. (Not an exaggeration—I've counted.) I could segue here into a rant about the state of email in general, about how it's gotten out of control and unmanageable and become an inefficient distraction. And I could make an excellent case that it is all those things: According to a 2015 report by technology market research firm The Radicati Group, more than 205 billion emails are sent and received every day, and that number—spam included—is expected to grow by 3 percent every year over the next four years. The rapid growth of Slack, the interoffice chat app that bills itself as the email killer, would seem to suggest that there is indeed an email problem—over 2 million people now use it. But maybe I'm just being defensive. 

Because in that meme, one "type" is clearly the good "type"—the one with the unread emails—and the other "type," with thousands of unread emails, is disorganised, lazy, and unproductive. Our culture is one that values productivity, and my number (again, today it's 1,782), telegraphs that I'm not productive. That I haven't got my shit together.

The thing is, I don't have my shit together all the time, and I also run a big website and manage a team of 15. And I know that that's okay, even if it's a scary thing to admit. If I think about my inbox logically I know that: 1) it's full of spam 2) in order to be truly efficient and productive, tending fastidiously to my email will be a hindrance. (On a recent episode of the tech radio show Note to Self, Brian Christian, co-author of the book Algorithms to Live By, argued that we should all apply a "search not sort" maxim to email maintenance for maximum efficiency.) I remind myself that I can "email like a dude"—which is to say curtly, with one- to two- (lowercase) word answers, as many of my former male bosses did (and likely still do). I also remind myself that it's also okay to consider your recipient in emails and make an effort to sound friendly. (Doing things "like a dude" is rarely the right way to do things. It's often just the most culturally acceptable way. But that's a discussion for a different essay.)

I asked Liz Bentley, a leadership development consultant and president of Liz Bentley Associates—who, full disclosure, is my own coach at work to help me deal with just these kinds of issues—about how men and women process failure. She said that when men fail, they "have a tendency to get mad, whereas women, while sometimes mad, may become more sad. Men more often expect to succeed and do well, so [they] are mad when it doesn't work out for them. Whereas women work hard to do well, so [they] are sad and disappointed when they fail."

And there's the rub: Women hold themselves to higher standards of success than men and take it more personally when they fail. Men get angry. Women tend to internalise failure and turn it into shame. It's a theme that comes up again and again. Esmé Weijun Wang wrote about it beautifully in her piece about living with chronic illness, focusing specifically on her perceived failure to be productive:  

"It's my work ethic and ambition that call my 'doing nothing' laziness; and laziness, or sloth, is cause in our go-go-go society for shame of the highest order…. In a society that holds productivity as unequivocally good, to do less feels like a moral failing."

In her brave essay about failure, editor-at-large Melissa Harris-Perry put it simply: "Held too tightly, failure shifts from guilt to shame. Guilt is motivational. Shame is corrosive."

I'll likely never stop feeling guilty about my unread emails. I devote two to four hours every Sunday to going through my inbox in an attempt to get to zero unread. (Sorry in advance, publicists. I'll get back to you...maybe) And I'll never stop feeling like I'm not getting enough done. But what I can try to do is be gentler on myself. I can let go of this failure that is not really a failure but a byproduct of my industry (and, increasingly, most industries) and the way that business gets done (i.e., with a fire hose of information aimed directly at my inbox at all times). I'm never going to get it all done, and I feel fine about it.  


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