Confessions of an E-mail Addict

by Stephanie Black

My mother considers e-mail to be a great blessing in her life. I agree. E-mail allows our family to remain close in a way that would have been impossible in pre-Internet days. My parents and two brothers live in Utah, I live in California, one sister is in Arizona, one is in Pennsylvania and one is in Virginia. Without e-mail, we’d still have the phone and the USPS—but how often would we actually sit down, write a whole letter, make six copies and mail them out? Not often. And phone calls are great, but are usually between two parties—not the whole gang. E-mail can be a group conversation. Rather than long letters sent only occasionally, we can fire back little messages and updates and encouragements and pictures on a frequent basis and get rapid responses. We can cheer each other on and help each other through the rough times.

I love e-mail.

Besides the keep-in-touch factor, I also love e-mail for practical reasons. Administrative/planning issues that would have once taken a jillion phone calls to organize can be dealt with through one e-mail sent to multiple parties. Or do I need to discuss an upcoming YM/YW event and the YM’s president is on a business trip? No problem. All hail e-mail.

E-mail makes being a writer much easier. A decade ago when I wanted feedback on a manuscript, I printed the manuscript, put it in a binder (and it was big—somewhere between 400-500 pages), packed it in a box, took it to the post office and paid to ship it my sister in Houston. Now, when I want to send a manuscript to test readers, this involves clicking “new message”, “attach”, “select file” and “send.” Send it next door or send it to Germany, it’s a snap either way. I can get multiple reads on the manuscript without spending a penny for postage or ink cartridges. Love it. Then when it comes time to submit a manuscript to my publisher, it’s the same process—a few clicks and it’s there, with no more fussing over manuscript boxes and printed pages and postage. E-mail is also great for little questions that don’t seem to merit a whole phone call. I can fire off a quick e-mail with a formatting question and my editor fires an answer right back.

The problem I have with e-mail is that I’m addicted. I remember learning that intermittent reinforcement—where you don’t get the prize every time you push the button, but sometimes you do and you never know when it will be—is the most powerful type of behavior reinforcement. E-mail is serious intermittent reinforcement. Even if I just checked my e-mail three minutes ago, there might be something new there. It might just be Amazon ads, but it might be a fun e-mail from my mom, or an interesting post on an online writer’s group, or a message from my editor saying they’ve picked the title for my book. No way to know unless I check! Sometimes I try to turn my e-mail off while I work, but then when my mind wanders, I think hmm, maybe I’ll open it back up just to see if there’s anything interesting there. . .

I need help. Somebody e-mail me the name of a good counselor.