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MANAGING E-MAIL

The life we want is not merely the one we have chosen and made. It is the one we must be choosing and making.

—WENDELL BERRY

E-mail is a fairly recent phenomenon without a direct comparison. Unlike voice mail, it is visual; yet, unlike a letter, which is visual, there is no physical manifestation. It exists, but only in a box, and when you turn off the box, it doesn’t exist anymore. We can ignore it.

Think about it. E-mail doesn’t inhabit a physical space, but we like to say it takes up psychic space—it clutters your mind. It would be difficult to store thousands and thousands of files in our cubicles, yet we can store massive quantities of e-mail in our computer in-boxes. And although there are fewer space constraints in ...

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