如何擺脫電子郵件之苦

如何擺脫電子郵件之苦

“電子郵件本應是自電話發(fā)明以來最好的商務工具，但是它卻變成了自從電視發(fā)明以來最浪費時間的工具”。FT專欄作家西蒙·庫珀為如何擺脫電郵的困擾提供了一些有趣的建議。

測試中可能遇到的詞匯和知識：

chore 家庭雜務；討厭的或累人的工作

pleb 平民

anglophone 英語世界的

circa 大約

onus 責任，負擔

hourly rate 小時工資

閱讀即將開始，建議您計算一下閱讀整篇文章所用時間，并對照我們在文章最后給出的參考值來估算您的閱讀速度。

How to free yourself from email

By Simon Kuper

‘It should have been the best business tool since the telephone. Instead email has become the biggest time-waster since television’

* * *

The other day I was exchanging emails about some chore with a woman I’d never met. At one point she wrote: “Well, have a lovely break over the weekend, I must say I’m looking forward to a few days off, specially if this sun keeps shining.” Think of the time wasted: hers in writing this, mine in reading it. Then multiply it by several billion. This is the world today: we now spend 28% of working time on email, according to the McKinsey Global Institute in 2012. Email should have been the best business tool since the telephone. Instead it has become the biggest time-waster since television.

Pundits typically recommend email moderation: check only twice a day, for instance. But as banking shows, self-regulation doesn’t always work. After 20 years online, I’m still addicted. Partly it’s because email offers a mindless break from work without even the hassle of getting up. Partly it’s the eternal dream of good news. (“Hi Simon, Steven Spielberg here. I loved your column! Can we make it into a movie?”) My colleagues Tim Harford and Lucy Kellaway have recently addressed the problem of email. But I favour more drastic remedies.

Modernise email etiquette. Any medium requires time to develop an etiquette: Alexander Graham Bell wanted to start phone calls with “Ahoy” but then Thomas Edison came up with “Hello”. Today’s etiquette for email is all wrong. We still model emails on letters: “Hi Simon?.?.?.?Love, Scarlett.” Instead, the model should be teenagers’ text messages. Write without greetings, capital letters or punctuation and, as the Twitter user @NarrowTheAngle suggested when I consulted Twitter’s collective brain, “youcouldconsidergettingridofspacesbetweenwordstoo”. Possibly relax these rules when emailing the Queen.

Keep your email address private. Email began as a democratic medium but now the elite is sealing itself off. One famous chief executive let it be known that he – not a secretary – read his emails. That made employees hesitate before writing to him: nobody wanted to waste his time.

The elite retreats from every medium. As Paul Husbands shows in The People’s President, US presidents went from receiving random citizens at the White House to not even reading their letters. Later, the elites got ex-directory phone numbers (not shown on yellow pages). Today, elites have unguessable email addresses ([email protected], say), which they only give to other elites. Their official addresses are just for show. We plebs should follow suit. Post a fake email address online, then never check it.

The authorities should stamp out time wasting. It’s a myth concocted by the anglophone media that France banned work emails after 6pm – but France should have. Similarly, companies could activate their email servers only twice daily. Anyone needing contact in between could phone. I recall circa 1996 the FT refusing to introduce email in the building, reasoning that it was a time-wasting fad. That was probably correct. Seers such as Alan Greenspan, the former head of the US Federal Reserve, expected the internet to boost productivity but this hasn’t happened.

Emailers shouldn’t expect replies. A reader once sent me the perfect email: “I did enjoy your piece last week – great fun. Best wishes. No need to ack[nowledge].” Almost every email should end “no need to ack”. Then you wouldn’t spend half your birthday answering “happy birthday” emails. Companies should automatically put “do not reply” in the subject heading, and leave the onus on the user to change it.

The key point: whenever you email someone you are intruding, stealing time that they could be spending with their family – or without their family. You certainly shouldn’t be blithely asking them for unpaid services. There’s one dreaded email, familiar to every professional writer, known as “Will you read my article?” The correct answer is, “Certainly. My hourly rate is?.?.?.?”

Probably the best business secret Sir Alex Ferguson, the former Manchester United manager, will have to impart at Harvard Business School is what he once told Tony Blair’s aide Alastair Campbell: don’t let people steal your time with petty requests. Ferguson said:

“People want to get into your space. Only you decide who gets into your space.” Ferguson’s message for petitioners: “I think you can resolve this yourself.”

If anyone demands a reply, punish them. If somebody writes, “Please could you go over this again, answering my queries”, then respond with tedious questions of your own. George Orwell used this method to deter time-wasting publishers.

A more radical solution: never reply. My FT colleague Jonathan Eley tweeted me his advice: “When you go on holiday, set up Gmail to delete incoming emails so you don’t have to spend a day going through them.” A friend of mine from pre-internet days had a similar policy: he never opened boring letters. Sometimes this produced negative shocks: he’d belatedly discover, say, that he’d run up a ￡100 library fine. On the upside, he didn’t spend any time on administration.

I think I may have hit upon a solution to the global economic crisis.

請根據(jù)你所讀到的文章內(nèi)容，完成以下自測題目：

1. Why is the writer still addicted to emails?

a. Like banks, self-regulation doesn't work.

b. Checking emails twice a day is still too much.

c. People always dream about receiving good news.

d. A false Spielberg once emailed the writer.

2. What does this mean:

“Certainly. My hourly rate is...”

a. It's the writer's self-mocking that his salary is too low.

b. It explains that "emailers should not expect replies".

c. It explains why one should waste the receivers' time.

d. It's a good tip on not wasting time on others' requests through email.

3. How to punish those who demand email reply, according to the writer?

a. Resply in as few words as possible.

b. Respond with tedious questions.

c. Respond what Orwell replied to his publishers.

[1] 答案c. People always dream about receiving good news.

解釋：作者兩次寫道Partly it’s because...這就是兩個原因。一個是查郵件可以中斷一下工作，另一個原因是人們“永恒的渴望好消息的夢想”，比如作者也做白日夢有天斯皮爾伯格發(fā)信來說要把他的專欄拍成電影。

[2] 答案d. It's a good tip on not wasting time on others' requests through email.

解釋：這一段都是在講“發(fā)郵件者不應該期待對方回復”，有三個主要內(nèi)容：1.告知了某個信息后，加上一句“不必回復”是最好的。2.有個竅門：用占用對方很多時間的方式來發(fā)郵件，這樣就不用收到回復了。3.如果有人給你發(fā)郵件要你幫忙，而這要花很多時間無償勞動，就可以回復說“可以，我每小時收費是....”。

[3] 答案b. Respond with tedious questions.

解釋：讀過多篇Kuper的文章的話，你可能會注意到弗格森爵士和喬治·奧威爾是他的兩大偶像，他經(jīng)常引用它們。