Does Getting More Email Make You More Important?

I don’t get many emails these days.

Before I began writing full time, I was a publicist. Being a publicist means being available on email most of the time. I didn’t want to miss an urgent media request or an important question from a client.

I would send at least 100 pitch emails a week, and I was always in the middle of multiple lengthy email conversations with different people about one thing or another. Email was a big part of my job.

I didn’t realize how big until I quit my job last fall, and my inbox got much, much quieter.

At first, the sound of crickets was nice.

I liked going to lunch and not dreading returning to an inbox full of time-sensitive requests. I had time and space to write and think and brainstorm—the things I needed time and space to do in my new role as a writer.

After a few weeks though, I grew antsy.

I would start working on an article or a paragraph and then, instinctively click over to my Gmail. Nothing. So I would return to writing and type out another paragraph and then click back over to Gmail again. Still nothing.

Why am I not getting more email? I would ask myself.

Why don’t people need me every hour of every day like they used to?

The truth about my diminishing inbox is it has freed me up to do the work I need to do.

I need to be able to sit and write, undistracted, for long periods of time. Having an email pop up every five to ten minutes would tear me away from my work, and having long conversations over email isn’t really the nature of what I do anymore.

Still, I can’t help but feel less important with a less full inbox.

Email made me feel important. It made me feel needed. It made me feel busy.

But just because email makes you feel more important doesn’t mean you are more important.

I’ve noticed an interesting paradox about myself.

As work gets quieter, less frantic, and less hustle-y, I feel more frantic, more hustle-y and less able to rest.

This is what happens when our self-worth feels threatened.

We get got anxious and hustle-y and all workaholic-like. We cannot, for the life us, just sit still, rest and feel ok amidst the quiet non-existence of our emails.

My friend sent me an article (in an email) the other day that included this quote from Blaise Pascal:

“Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest…without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness…his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness.”

This is what I’ve felt the last few months—

the nothingness, the insufficiency, the emptiness and the weakness. It’s uncomfortable, but, as the writer in the article goes onto say, “Without disconnected solitude, we cannot feel the weight of our need; we cannot taste our desperation for God.”

Christians sing “I need Thee every hour” but then we turn to our work and sing “I need me every hour” instead. There is a disconnect here, and it is only discovered when our work and busyness is stripped away and we are forced to face our own nothingness, our own emptiness.

I didn’t know how disillusioned I was about my own importance until work slowed down.

But I’m so glad it did because now I know that above my biggest career aspirations, my most important job is to sit in the quiet and in the rest and hope that one day, I will feel comfortable here.

I hope the same for you.

Does Getting More Email Make You More Important? is a post from: Storyline Blog