I turned it off

And I made a mistake

It will not come as a surprise to any of you who have emailed me in the past ever that I have a very hard time checking my email.

By hard I mean I don’t want to do it. So I don’t.

To be clear, by “checking” I mean “dealing” with the work inside of my inbox—a receipt that needs to be filed in Dropbox, a request with no clear deadline, a bill, something I feel needs my full attention when I’m sitting behind my computer because I’m a Xennial and we don’t do important things from our phones.

In my defense, I’m very good at opening up my email first thing in the morning while having my coffee in bed (look at me, working hard even before the day officially starts), deleting anything irrelevant to me, reading my favorite newsletters, catching up on which businesses are in trouble based on their sales emails, feeling validated, quickly going down a rabbit hole, and then pulling myself out of bed.

I justify the seemingly poor decision of not dealing with my emails by filling my day with work that feels productive. I check everything off my list except for “check email” because I refuse to acknowledge its relevance by even writing it down on a list. When you run multiple small businesses while simultaneously working on becoming a writer with a capital W, it is not difficult to fill your day with important things. And when you’re the boss, you get to decide what’s important. No one’s surprised to learn email didn’t make that list either.

The last time I had under 1,000 unread messages was circa 2022, which I’m sure will go down in history as the before times to something catastrophic patiently waiting for us in the future. Perhaps this is the problem—an unchecked inbox is the least of my worries. I started ski and snowboard brand during peak climate change and the onset of late-stage capitalism. I’m expecting it all to crash and burn relatively soon, so no need to sweat the small stuff.

But because I’m a Virgo it still annoys me that I have unfiled messages from 2023 in my inbox, so I do occasionally open iMail, click in my inbox, and swipe up as hard as I can to see just how far back I can go. It’s shocking what I unearth. Many are deleted because that Semafor Africa newsletter or Quartz Daily Brief from 14 months ago is no longer relevant. Sometimes I really have to sit with them and debate whether I delete because I’m too embarrassed so much time has passed or I respond with something clever… because too much time has passed. Occasionally I get to file away the receipt or recipe or I stumble upon an email I want to turn into a template or a piece of copy that is so good it gets a copy/paste into a note.

As of late, I have attempted to be proactive in reducing the clutter in my inbox. Perhaps, I thought to myself, I don’t need to receive so many emails. So I logged into my Substack account, clicked on some button that would inevitably be an absolute pain to find again, and turned off all notifications. I thought I was doing myself a solid as the number of newsletters I subscribe to is verging on obscene.

I succeeded in reducing the number of emails in my inbox. But it became so boring and sad. News about all the dumb Trump things made me want to scream into the void and smoke more cigarettes. I was spending more time scrolling through Instagram, time I’ll never get back. I thought perhaps my favorite writers were taking a break because they were still mourning the election or engulfed with the holidays. But then I remembered I clicked that damn button and made the good things stop.

I love reading. I love engaging with thought leadership. I love learning. I love thinking about the world in new ways and imagining a new future. I missed out on all that for a few weeks because I wanted one less thing to do.

What I learned is that we can’t hit pause, click unsubscribe, and turn it all off because there are things in there that make our lives better.

We need the people who will inspire us. We need the people who invoke hope. We need the activists, the rabble-rousers, the visionaries, and the peacemakers. We need the people who will bring us together. If our go-to is to hide out, believing we don’t have enough energy or the bandwidth to participate in what’s being offered to us, we will miss out on all of the good things in life. I’m thinking about the community meet-ups, the dinner with friends, the virtual gatherings, the volunteer opportunities, the local events, and yes, sometimes that email that has the words in it that you needed to read on that day.

There is so much work to be done. And good work! Work that brings us closer together, closer to the people we want to spend time with, and closer to living fulfilling and joyful lives.

Now is not the time to turn it off. Now is the time to turn it up.

ICYMI, last month I hosted a virtual gathering for paid subscribers where we spent time working with the social change framework created by Deepa Iyer. It’s a really simple yet remarkable tool that helps us understand where we fit into social change movements, specifically what roles best suit us and our skills. The presentation notes are below for paid subscribers. If you’re not a paid subscriber and would like to access the notes and December’s gathering (which I have some fun ideas about), you can subscribe today.