Another thing I’ve found is that there’s a kind of degraded character to e-mail messages. People are just too casual about them—they send you any half-baked idea they haven’t even thought through yet, whenever the impulse hits them. And the result is, it ends up being a tremendous burden even to read everything that comes across, let alone to answer it—so that can easily end up being all you do with your time. And people do put huge numbers of hours into it. In fact, there are friends of mine whose quality of work I think is seriously declining, because of their overwhelming involvement in
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