A place for everything

I decided a couple of weeks ago to empty out my email in-box.

I didn’t intend it as a symbolic gesture, but, as sometimes happens with clean-up projects, it took on a larger meaning once I got started. It wasn’t that I expected to delete all of the sixty-two messages in my in-box; I just wanted to sort them all into folders. In general, I’m pretty good about using email folders for work-related projects and volunteer committee work, but so many correspondences seem to defy easy classification. And so I just let them sit there in my in-box.

It occurred to me that perhaps, that signified a bigger problem. It didn’t seem like I should have any correspondence that I had no way of classifying. So I resolved that I would put every single in-box correspondence into a folder. Anything I felt I needed to keep was hereby required to be assigned some kind of identity. And no cheating by using “Miscellaneous” or “Random” labels either, I told myself.

But some emails just contained little intriguing quotes from my daily inspirational email subscription. Okay then, I decided, there would be a label for “Inspirations.” And some were emails complimenting articles I’d written. Well, then, why not a folder for “Compliments”? Confirmations of items I’d ordered but not yet received became “Pending orders.”

What I quickly discovered with this simple exercise was the beauty of taxonomy, of determining that there’s a place for everything, even if it’s a virtual rather than material place. From that point, it was easy to make the analytical leap to conceding that anything that defied labeling probably wasn’t an email I needed.

Once my email in-box was empty, I resolved to go through the same exercise every day. That part was easy. But then I took a critical look around my house and wondered if the same principles that worked for virtual correspondence could be applied to household clutter. In theory, I already had a designated place for everything that mattered: recipes, pay stubs, pet medications, office supplies, tickets to upcoming events, musical instruments. And yet still, random items piled up on shelves and tables, in closets and in corners, just as they do in everyone else’s house. Is it possible, I asked myself, to make a rule that if I can’t figure out where it should be stored, then we probably don’t need it?

It strikes me as a fairly aggressive approach to household clean-up, and we’re not quite there yet. I still can’t figure out where to put empty candy boxes that Holly has decorated with ribbons and stickers, or vacation postcards whose images I want to admire just a little longer, or a pretty bottle that once held olive oil. But just thinking about it this way helps a little. If it really matters, figure out where it goes, I tell myself, and within minutes, the ever-accumulating clutter piles have been reduced.

True, those piles grow back, just as my in-box accrues new emails every day. It’s not a perfect system. I still lose emails because I can’t remember how I labeled them (but gmail makes it easy to search by sender or topic), and I certainly haven’t quite defeated the clutter problem in our house. But it’s an interesting way to approach the problem, and I haven’t given up yet.

Work and non-work: Decompartmentalizing

It was probably the most trivial item on my entire To Do list this week, and yet it made such a difference in my sense of personal organization.

“Fix email folders,” I had jotted down on my tasks list. I wasn’t sure what exactly I needed to do; I just sensed that there was probably a way to re-organize my email folders that would be more visually satisfying to me.

As it was, I had one main folder called “Work,” under which were numerous subfolders for emails related to upcoming articles and those already in progress; and another main folder called “Personal,” in which were folders for volunteer activities, community events, family correspondences and vacation plans.

I hadn’t chosen the designations “Work” and “Personal”; they were the default folders assigned by Gmail, but they seemed logical enough to me when I set up my mailbox. Everything presumably related to one or the other: work or personal life, so surely this was as good a way as any to start the process of dividing one’s correspondences.

But somehow it just didn’t work for me on a psychological level. The work items didn’t necessary feel like work, and the personal items sometimes did feel like work. It made sense to put emails related to an event I was covering for the Globe into a work folder, but when I received tickets to the same event by email, the tickets didn’t seem like they should be classified as work. And organizing the faculty/staff luncheon at my kids’ school is a volunteer activity, which made it by definition personal; yet it certainly felt more like work than leisure as I sent out countless emails asking people for food contributions and reiterating once again the school kitchen’s nut-free policy.

So I simply removed the “work” and “personal” designations. It was such a trivial act, but it did so much to clear my mind, because on a symbolic level, it seemed so much more genuinely reflective of my life. I do a variety of different things every day, and since I’m self-employed and write from home, “work” assignments don’t always feel so different from “personal” assignments. In the course of a typical week day, I might research an article, interview a subject, vacuum the carpets, make up the next month’s schedule for school library volunteers, select a recipe for dinner, draw up an agenda for the adult ed class I teach, and respond to an email about an issue related to church. What’s work? What’s leisure? What’s personal? What’s domestic?

This isn’t a complaint. Not at all. It’s life the way I believe it should be lived. Yes, I need to keep the revenue-producing tasks on my radar as a priority; given the choice between taking on another volunteer role at the kids’ school and accepting an assignment from a magazine I haven’t previously written for, I’m likely to gravitate to the latter, both for practical and ideological reasons. Writing is still one of my greatest interests as well as what I get paid to do. But I also really value the fact that as a self-employed person, I’m able to integrate so many other aspects of my life into the so-called “work” day.

When I was in my early 20’s and still new to the professional realm, working full-time in a corporate role, I was a little stunned to realize just how much of every day most people spent at their jobs. Even as an entry-level employee not expected to take work home or put in extra hours, I was there from 8:30 to 5 every weekday. “That’s the whole day,” I marveled silently during my first week of employment, a little bit horrified to discover this secret of adulthood that I’d previously chosen to overlook.

I realize how lucky I am now to be self-employed now. It gives me time to do both what I get paid for and what I like to do, whether those two categories are discrete or overlapping. Dissolving the “work” and “personal” designations in my email box was a token gesture, but for me they held a lot of symbolism. It was useful to me to override the Gmail defaults and acknowledge that in my life, “work” and “personal” are often indistinguishable, and that’s one of many things about my life for which I am truly grateful.

Off-line

It is so hard for me to go offline for any period of time, and yet I’m so aware of how much I need to do this more regularly.

I’ve written before about my ambivalence about not having a Smartphone, which would give me easy access to email when I’m away from home. Sometimes I’m tempted to upgrade, and other times I’m so appreciate of the value of being compelled to just leave my email behind now and then – whether it’s for short periods of time when I go out to do errands or go for a walk, or longer periods of time like the day last month when I spent eight hours on a daytrip to southern Maine and had no access to email from about nine in the morning to five in the afternoon.

If anything, lately I feel like I’ve become more compelled to be on line. Receiving a hand-me-down netbook from my mother meant my online world was more portable then ever around the house, if still not actually portable outside the house. It became so easy to have the netbook with me in the kitchen when I was preparing meals, or on the porch when I was reading the paper, or on my nighttable when I was getting ready for bed at night.

But I was also becoming increasingly aware lately that I go to the Internet, particularly email, for the wrong reasons. I was constantly searching, waiting, anticipating that all-important email…and yet I can no longer explain what that email might be.

At some point it occurred to me I was looking at my computer screen the same way my husband sometimes looks into the fridge: certain that there must be something in there to satisfy his longings, and yet unable to name what that longing might be for, when I ask him pointblank what it is that he wants to eat.
And so this past weekend it was with a sense of relief that I closed up my computer at 10:00 Saturday morning and left for an overnight trip. “There’s nothing I need. There’s nothing that will come by email this weekend that will make my life any better than it already is,” I told myself several times. And I didn’t give it another thought while we were away.

The funny thing was that when we arrived home midafternoon on Sunday, I found I still didn’t want to get on line. I didn’t care how many emails had built up; just like my husband with the fridge, none of them was going to fulfill the nameless thing I wanted from it.

So I went for a walk in the woods instead. I walked for an hour and a quarter, and then when I got home I turned on my computer at last. I had 30 new emails, certainly not a staggering number for a day and a half off line. I scanned the subject lines quickly. A few from friends who I was happy to hear from, but none of them contained anything terribly important. A lot of ads, of course. A few items related to community events or issues. Nothing work-related since it was a holiday weekend. I went through them all briefly, responded to some, and then disconnected. It felt good.

Changing my ways this one time doesn’t mean I’ve ended my compulsion once and for all. It just means I’m trying really hard to rethink it, to remind myself that a sense of spiritual or emotional enrichment almost never comes via email. I don’t know if I really have the capacity to improve in this area. But reminding myself of how much more that walk in the woods did for me than scanning my emails ever will seems like a good start.

Smartphone-free and fully focused

Because my kids are not exactly brimming over with intellectual curiosity every day, it can take a bit of effort on my part to get them to enjoy a cultural excursion. So when they agreed to my suggestion that we visit the Salem Witch Museum on a rainy day earlier this week, I made sure that a hearty meal at a local luncheonette was part of the deal. We were sitting at a booth when Tim, after watching a table of construction workers all pull out their iPhones simultaneously and start scrolling through their screens, suddenly said, “Mom, you should really have a smartphone.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because everyone else does,” he responded. I suppressed a smile. Isn’t that normally the reason kids his age – twelve – want things for themselves: because everyone else has it? Was I discovering a new phase of child development: peer pressure by transference? Bad enough for a pre-teen not to have what everyone else does: is it even more embarrassing when your mom doesn’t hold the latest purse-sized technology?

“I don’t want a smartphone,” I told him. “I like to be able to walk away from my email. If I had a smartphone right now, I’d be checking my email and writing back to people. I like having to just leave it all behind when we go somewhere together.”

So it was fitting that less than 24 hours after this conversation, I was reading an article about MIT internet expert Sherry Turkle, who in her newest book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, describes her experience conducting interviews with hundreds of teen subjects who complained about their parents’ overuse of mobile technology when they should be paying attention to their kids.

Turkle said that most people who heard that had the same reaction: they expected to hear that parents were complaining about their kids’ reliance on constant access to mobile communication, but what she instead found was the opposite. No matter whether they are toddlers or teens: kids want their parents’ undivided attention. My kids complain when we do errands or go to community events and I spend time chatting with other adults I know. “No chatting, Mom!” they insist time and again.

If I had a smartphone, it would be like chatting, only silently, I fear. My attention would be directed away from them even when we were deliberately choosing to spend time together. Turkle describes the scenarios she sees in which parents’ attention gets divided: a mother pushing a child on the swing with one hand and texting with the other; a father who sends emails during his son’s baseball game. As Turkle points out, it’s a mistake on many levels, and not only because it detracts from one-on-one time between parent and child. It’s also dangerous to let yourself get so distracted, and multitasking tends to lead to a decrease in the quality of whatever it is you are trying to accomplish as you multi-task.

So despite Tim’s comment, I’m glad not to carry my email around with me. I know I’d succumb to the temptation to use it when I shouldn’t, so why put myself in that position? As we ate our sandwiches, I listened to the kids talk about the witch museum, and then we all laughed quietly about a conversation going on at the booth behind us, which reminded us of a similar situation last month in which we heard a funny conversation at the booth behind us while we ate breakfast at a local diner. Tim asked me what kind of job I thought the construction workers who were avidly punching away at their phones as they waited for their lunches were doing on this rainy day, and Holly drew a picture on her paper placemat.

In short, we paid attention: to each other, to our surroundings. I was glad not to have any distractions; when my phone rang I silenced the ringer. My guess is that I won’t hold out forever. Everyone else walks around with their email at their fingertips, and eventually I will too. I just hope I remember that undivided attention should always be a priority: whether it’s on the kids, the driving, or just the sound of the rain against the restaurant’s windows.

Should a middle schooler email a teacher?

Following a recent eye exam, the pediatric ophthalmologist told us Tim did not need glasses but should ask his teachers to be seated in the front half of the classroom if possible. I emailed this request to the sixth grade team leader, who responded with assurances that this could be easily accommodated. A few days later, Tim was frustrated over his social studies homework. His teacher had told the kids to answer some questions about current events in Egypt as listed on a website associated with her class assignments, but Tim couldn’t find the link she had referred to. “Mom, can you email Ms. Rooney and ask her where it is?” he asked. I dashed off a quick query to Ms. Rooney, and she wrote back almost immediately verifying that she had in fact given the kids the wrong link. She gave me the corrected version and Tim went on to do his homework.

Both of these experiences gave me pause. Normally I consider the relationship between student and teacher to be sacred. Except for the few assignments that the elementary schoolers take home which are labeled “family homework,” I believe the kids should be responsible for communicating with their teachers about anything related to school absent the benefit of parental intervention.

At the same time, I wasn’t comfortable telling Tim to email his teachers. Every teacher at our school has a published email address and encourages parents to use this as a form of communication, but it seemed inappropriate for me to tell Tim to email his teacher. Not off-the-charts inappropriate, just mildly inappropriate. It just seems strange to me for a kid to email a teacher, as strange as it would have been when I was a student for a student to call a teacher on the phone. Yet I don’t necessarily know that the teachers feel this way; nor would I perhaps feel this way if my son was in high school rather than middle school.

Most likely, education is just another of the many arenas in which our (or at least my) general grasp of common etiquette has yet to catch up to social media, particularly regarding the sometimes awkward triumvariate of student, parent and teacher. Last summer, after I joined Facebook, one of the names that appeared on the “People you may know” listing was that of someone who’s been a friend for the past several years, ever since he was Tim’s third grade teacher. I clicked on “Send friend request” and only after he’d accepted it did I remember he was also Holly’s teacher for the upcoming year, and it might seem awkward to have her teacher reading my Facebook posts (though he would be the first to assure you he doesn’t read all my posts; who could possibly be expected to keep up with my verbosity?).

After the school year was under way, I would often forget he was a Facebook friend and realize only midway through a posted exchange in which other parents and I kvetched about an annoying and time-consuming third grade assignment that it was all visible to him.

I’ve read a raft of articles in recent years about college deans who are astounded by how over-involved the parents of incoming freshmen are in their children’s lives. They rail at the inappropriateness of parents calling their offices to complain about a rooming situation or a course load rather than having the students fight their own battles. I doubt I’ll ever be like this; I tend to lean the opposite way when it comes to expecting my kids to do their own dirty work, and from that perspective it seems reasonable for a kid to send an email to a teacher. At the same time, recent media coverage of schools that prohibit teachers from friending students on Facebook (or vice versa, by definition). But in some ways, we’re still testing the waters when it comes to social media, and I’m just not sure where a sixth grader emailing his social studies teacher falls on the spectrum of acceptability.