The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

by Scott Berkun

E-mail madness, or e-mailopathy, is the name I have for the psychological disorder where people are so overwhelmed by the waves of e-mail they receive that they protect their psyche by never reading any of it. Instead they skim e-mails quickly and write and send replies even quicker, like a paranoid, drunk blindfolded man pulling the trigger of a fully loaded AK-47. What they don't realize is if they send waves of bad e-mail out, they're guaranteed to get waves of bad e-mail back, especially if the person on the other end has the same disorder they do. If Pascal, who once wrote, “If I had more time I'd write a shorter letter,” had to contend with this, he'd have said, “If I read incoming e-mails carefully, the e-mails I send will generate fewer replies.”