This is as true today as it was back in 2007:
Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can’t handle that one tiny thing. “What ‘pile’? It’s just a fucking pebble!”
Merlin Mann
These days it’s not just email, or one inbox. We have DMs sitting in several social media apps, we have projects to follow up on, spread across multiple project management apps. Then we have text messages, voice mails, and oh yeah… email.
Lately I’ve been irritated by everything, mostly because everything is a pebble, and we’re all carrying around buckets of pebbles.
We already had to carry pebbles for our taxes and bills and all those emails, but we had release valves in the form of going to the gym, dinner with friends, going to a show.
For each of those activities we got to set down our bucket of rocks. The change in scenery, the change in context, it was a minor relief. We had a few of those per week, which was nice, because the bucket of rocks got heavy.
Now, on top of just all the normal pebbles and rocks, we see over half a million Americans dead. We see some states attacking transexual athletes. Outright racism. Dropping bombs. Rumors of another insurrection on the capitol. Texas lifting its mask mandate and opening everything up. No stimulus check. Massive unemployment.
Those are all pebbles, and rocks, and large boulders the size of large boulders, and they’re getting fucking heavy.