Don Knuth hasn’t used email in 20 years. That is hard to imagine nowadays especially from someone so important. On his site (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html) he says, “Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things,” and he describes himself as a “happy man.” His secretary will occasionally send emails on his behalf on urgent issues and she will print out emails sent to him, but he only reads these once every three months and responds with hand written letters.
I don’t know if I could ever do this. It seems like so much work these days is done through email that it would be impossible for me to not check my mail for even a week. Yet, I feel like I would be so much more efficient if I didn’t have to check my email so often especially when there is so much unimportant email. I would be able to get more actual stuff done. This reminds me of this company called Seriosity http://www.seriosity.com/products.html that tries to solve the email noise problem a lot of businesses have by using a currency system where you can attach a certain amount of fake currency to an email which determines its place in a person’s inbox. I really like this idea and I wish it could be implemented on a larger scale than just individual businesses.
