What I learned from time away from the Internet and email

How much email do you receive? Some people truly do receive too much email. Especially during peak operations time for whatever might be happening (maybe some crisis, maybe seasonal business, whatever), I've many times heard someone say to some complainer, "Sorry, but I have close to a thousand in my inbox right now, and yours is just buried somewhere where I haven't seen it."

I've experienced it too, and said similar things. I don't think anyone is rude for not replying to emails, especially if they're in a position to receive a lot of them. We should not attribute behaviour to malice so quickly and easily.

edit: I don't want to say that I think it's nice to have a policy to not reply to emails. I do want to say that it's not good to make assumptions about what's going on. And frankly, there are some emails that are not worth replying. Do you reply to every single cold call sales pitch that lands in your inbox?

I've tried auto-replies. People get even more offended by that. Here's someone that posted after getting an auto-reply in 2007: http://www.ginside.com/2007/1186/matt-cutts-doesnt-respond-t... . He was angry because he thought the battle against paid links was useless, and wanted me to email him back to justify our efforts on paid links. His conclusion? "When I met up with Matt at SES San Jose, he seemed like a cool guy, but I guess this [getting an auto-reply] proves my positive-assumptions wrong."

Don't get me wrong. I like Jonathan (the author of the blog) and stopped by his blog to leave a comment to answer his question.

But if you asked a neutral third party, "Which is better? To spend your time working on new algorithms for paid links? To write blog posts or make videos about paid links? Or to reply to emails justifying working on paid links?" I think the the neutral party would put replying to emails about paid links at the bottom of the priority list.

And the amount of email at Google is pretty epic. Even after trying to reduce my email load through all the conventional methods like unsubscribing from newsletters, my mail storage is over 50 gigabytes.

So there may not be a good conventional answer to the email issue for me. I really don't want to be rude by not responding to emails, but I also believe I should also be working on the biggest-impact things I can.

> I get just as much email as you - promise! - but I really do try to respond to everything.

I receive about 20 emails a day (to my personal email -- even disregarding work) that are deserving of a well-thought-out response, and aren't part of an existing thread or relationship. Of those, I may respond to 2-4. Any more would simply be too large a drain on my time; email already occupies several hours of my day, and the payoff just isn't there to justify increasing that, since it would come at the expense of other things I feel are higher priority, like spending time with the people I care about.

I've actually been thinking about performing an experiment: you can pay me $X to send me an email. If $X > $Y, I'll guarantee a response (and a thoughtful one, at that), and I'll respond to the current highest paid email first, in case of inundation. You could still send me email via normal channels of course, but this would be a way of jumping over the normal hurdles I use when prioritizing (do I know you personally? do we have a business relationship? do I know you from HN? do I know your work? etc). Has anyone done this or considered it?

/etc/hosts does the trick for me. I'm also noticing that whenever I am stuck solving a problem I open a new tab, starting to type one of my self-forbidden websites. Blocking it completely helps :)

I've banned social networking / news reading to my phone, so I'm only doing it when I have to wait, e.g. on a train.

I went ahead and updated the blog post to explain, but I'll include what I wrote here too. Sorry if I didn't explain that clearly. I still see what people are discussing on SEO blogs and on the Google webmaster forum. I know the most recent trends in how blackhats try to spam Google--that's my primary job, after all. I look through the questions and comments that people send me on Twitter. When I put out a call for webmaster video questions, I use Google Moderator so people can vote up questions that interest them. I keep an eye on what flavors of spam snake oil are being marketing to newbies on various forums ("I know Google pulled apart my last link network, but now try my Social Rank Tout Suite product! It will automate 100% of all of your link building!"). And lots of people at Google keep an eye open themselves and alert me if they see issues.

So I feel like I have a pretty good feel for the pulse of what people are talking about; it's just that I lack the time to have one-on-one conversations with every person that emails me.

If leaving out wheat helped your sinuses, it might be worth investigating if you have a Histamine intolerance (my wife has that, and the symptoms you described).

If you have indeed a Histamine intolerance, you'd know what other food to avoid (for example easily spoiled fruit like strawberries), and there are enzymes you can take if once you couldn't avoid such food.