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Many new time management books out in the past few years try to help their readers tame their beastly inboxes by offering tips on filtering, filing, prioritizing, and organizing, as well as add-ons to enhance these processing capabilities. They suggest scheduling times to check mail, rather than keeping it open all day; they give tips on writing subject lines that are relevant, text that is short and to the point, requests and timelines that are clear.  Freeman makes these suggestions as well, but he goes one huge step further:  his first suggestion is not to send the email at all.

The more emails you send, the more you will receive, and if you send to or copy a group, the amount you receive will increase exponentially.  Your day will begin with opening an email inbox flooded with new mails, throwing new "to-do's" at you until you forget what your priorities for the day really are.  And when you start to work on any of them you will be constantly interrupted until your thoughts fragment and the quality of your work suffers.  But you can't just drop out of the fray, because people are expecting you to respond faster than you can even read them.  To perform you must be always on, 24/7, no matter where you are.  What was supposed to be a freeing, asynchronous, convenient way of contacting people has taken on a life force of its own, creating its own work items, deadlines, and noise independent of the goals of the people or organizations that "use" it.

How did we get to this point?  Every wave of new communication technology over the last few thousand years has had its drawbacks. The invention of writing degraded oral story-telling.  Books copied by scribes spread ideas and education but left out the masses in favor of the elite.  The printing press reintegrated the masses but was viewed as degrading the quality human thought, as just about "anything" could get published.  Formal mail systems eroded the specialness of receiving news from afar and brought in advertisers and junk. The invention of postcards caused people to lament the practice of long, thoughtful letter writing and decry the cluttering of physical mailboxes with frivolous pictures. The telegraph brought immediacy at the price of extreme brevity.  The telephone favored casual chatter at the expense of any kind of writing.  News services over the telegraph wires and television waves created a one-to-many distribution that brought the nation together culturally, but squelched local distinctiveness.

The electronic age, then, with its capabilities of near instantaneous interaction one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many, brought with it great advantages of speed and convenience, a blasting of geographic and cultural barriers, and the highly democratic ability for anyone to publish or broadcast whatever thought, idea or rumor happens to cross his or her mind.  Email across the decentralized network of the Internet is so powerful that it can easily overwhelm even the most stalwart of us on any given day.  We forget that there are, indeed, other ways of communicating, other mediums or forums that might be much better for a particular type of content, audience, or intent.  And we forget that it is only when we are cut off from the multitudes, alone and in silence, when we do our best reflecting and thinking-the type of "work" that results in real gains, not incremental checks on an ever-growing to-do list.

What Freeman proposes is not so much another system of handling or reducing email but a global rethinking of our means and modes of communication: "Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change.  In short we need to slow down."

We must realize that "progress" is not always achievable or desirable.  Instead, we must step back from the fray and learn to decide what is working and what is not.  What is this frantic pace doing for any of us, other than gratifying a short-term addictive desire for novelty and the feeling of being needed?  We need to reconnect with our physical bodies, our flesh-and-blood family and friends, and our communities. Collectively we need to use email a lot more sparingly and with a lot less dependency if we are to gain control of our lives.

Freeman's manifesto for this "Slow Communication Movement," based on that for the Slow Food movement, has three main tenets:

• Speed Matters. We need to realize that the speed at which we do something changes our experience of it. Speed used to convey urgency, but now we often mistakenly believe it signifies efficiency. There is a time and place for rapid answers in email, but the bulk of our real work, on the job and in our relationships, should be given much more careful thought and reflection.
• The Physical World Matters. Electronic communication and meetings can help with work efficiency, but not at the expense of real-world interaction. The former should only be used when the players have all met face-to-face and have a forum for doing so regularly. The same goes for friends- instead of a night lurking on Facebook, invite someone out for coffee!
• Context Matters. Sometimes the efficiency and convenience of electronic communication is outweighed by the interpretations and misinterpretations of a tone-deaf medium devoid of any literal context. The solution is not in more sophisticated online technology, but in slowing down and turning back to the real world.

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