Your Email Inbox Controls You, Not the Other Way Around
By: Simon Pitt
Tags: Digital Life, Gadgets, Email, Smartphones, Tech

Your Email Inbox Controls You, Not the Other Way Around

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

Sometimes, I wonder who is in charge: me or the gadgets? “You’re running low on storage,” my devices tell me, “An update is required. Your battery is low. Review your security settings. This version is no longer supported. Secure your account with two-factor authentication. Backup your recovery codes.” On my desktop, there’s an image of an overflowing bin that needs emptying. It would be quaint were it not such an on-the-nose metaphor for the list of computer chores I need to do. I spend a lot of time being nagged by tech.

I’m pretty diligent when it comes to looking after gadgets. I keep my software up to date, clean my screens, remove dust from the fan vents, and clean my keyboard (pro tip: don’t do this on a full stomach.) These physical tasks are something we have to accept about possessions: The richer we are, the more things we have to dust. As Caity Weaver says in the New York Times about a ridiculously overpriced T-shirt: “The thing about a $590 T-shirt is that, upon acquiring one, you immediately become the human assistant to a $590 T-shirt.” The same is true of my devices. I have a growing list of errands to run for my digital pseudo-employers. These tasks aren’t big or taxing, but they keep coming and my devices chase me until I do them.

The emails I receive from humans are a tiny fraction.

There’s tending to the email inbox, of course. We think of emails as being written by people, but the vast majority are from computers. There are the ones from shops confirming order details or offering deals. There are emails from systems nagging me to come back because I need to do or see something. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and so on. Jira is a particular power hose, sending me five emails every time someone even looks at a ticket I’m involved with. There are newsletters, and terms and conditions updates that I can’t opt-out of, and emails telling me a site I don’t remember signing up to has been hacked and my password has been exposed and now it’s up to me to go and change it. That’s before we even get to spam and unsolicited email. The emails I receive from humans are a tiny fraction. I’m deluged by tasks allocated from a database without a human ever intervening. We’re Mechanical Turks carrying out unpaid, mundane, minor tasks for the machines. According to a 2018 survey by Adobe, the average person spends three hours a day reading work emails and another two hours catching up on their own personal ones. Managing my inbox isn’t flicking through an in-tray. It’s using a spoon to bail out a boat moored under Niagara Falls.

Emails aren’t the only thing I need to clean out. My iCloud space is running low and Apple nags me to purchase more. My Dropbox is nearly full. Google Drive contains a long list of documents, some vitally important, others accidentally opened from a random website. My iPhone storage is approaching its limit. Until recently Google Photos offered unlimited storage, but next year I can look forward to that nagging me. Even now it pops up periodically and tells me to look at the photos it’s turned into animations and “color pops.”

There are automated tools to help with this. My phone has “recommendations.” I can offload unused apps, auto-delete old conversations, and automatically upload photos to the cloud. Windows has its own “Windows Clean-Up” tool with similar recommendations and suggestions. But these just push the problem downstream. By uploading my photos, I replace an alert that my phone is full with an alert that my iCloud storage is full. It’s a “choose your adventure” of nag screens.

Other recommendations aren’t time-savers at all. “Review large attachments” one suggests, “review personal videos.” My phone has found some more work for me to do. It all has a Marie Kondo air to it: Does this large attachment spark joy? Should I thank this PDF for its service and then delete it?

One solution is to throw money at these problems. You can buy an iPhone with more storage, upgrade Dropbox and iCloud and OneDrive and Google Drive. But this is like leasing a storage unit to stow the things you never use. Having lots of stuff creates lots of work. Syncing is slower, searching takes longer. You can even pay third-party companies to clean up your inbox for you. It’s like getting a cleaner to come and deal with the kitchen. We really have replicated our physical lives into the digital realm. And all of this to avoid the chore of tidying up your digital detritus, much of which wasn’t even generated by you. I’ve started to think of myself in an Odd-Couple-eque relationship with some of my devices. As fast as I can tidy them, they dump downloads onto the desktop and then expect me to clean them up.

“Digital Assistants,” like Siri and Alexa, offer the promise of saving time, like always-on, always-waiting PAs that jump to your bidding as soon as you ask. But the reality is different. There is a limited set of tasks they can help with. And even when Siri does something more complicated than setting a timer, the initial response is often “you need to unlock your iPhone first,” as if this is some sort of quid pro quo. Yes, I will do this task for you, but only after you do something for me.

By uploading my photos, I replace an alert that my phone is full with an alert that my iCloud storage is full. It’s a “choose your adventure” of nag screens.

Compared to 10 years ago, things are not so much better as different. I no longer have to defrag my disks. There are ways of automatically backing up my files. And my computer downloads updates in the background and installs them when I restart. But I still have to remember to open the Epic Games Launcher to download the near-daily Fortnite updates. My phone offers to install updates overnight, but doing so cancels my sleep-tracking alarm clock. The problem with our phones becoming everything devices is that we need them all the time: I use my phone even when I’m asleep. So, instead, my phone nags me to manually update it. When Apple’s Screen Time function was first released it reported that I used my phone 27 hours a day. This was a bug. But also an almost too accurate reflection of my phone usage.

Around 100 years ago, new electric devices came out that made our lives easier: the washing machine in 1904, the dishwasher at the end of the nineteenth century. We’ve enjoyed a century of machines taking chores away from us, but now the tables have turned, and we are the ones being given digital errands. We are nagged to update, clean up, review, refresh, backup, secure, reboot, and restart our devices. Increasingly this is more than just computers. I am chased by my phone, my iPad, my games consoles, my TV, even my scales, and my thermostat. On the internet, when I try to do something, I must first identify all the bicycles or bridges. Yes, the computer can do something for you, but only after you do something to help it.

Part of this is just the responsibility of ownership: If you want nice things, you have to look after them. But it’s also the result of a new relationship forced on us. This isn’t spelled out, but when we buy gadgets, we are not simply buying something that makes our life easier, we are signing up for a longer-term commitment that demands something of us in return and changes our behavior. And once we’ve committed to our gadgets, it’s difficult to break this contract. Not only do we have to abandon our devices, but also large parts of our lives: access to friends, entertainment, maybe even our livelihoods. Our gadgets change us. When you gaze for long into the iPhone screen, the iPhone screen gazes also into you.

It’s not entirely clear why we have to do these chores. Are these lists of tasks on purpose? Is it an app’s attempt at stickiness: to create habits and tiny endorphin rushes when we tick off each task? Or is it cheapness? Pushing back the work onto the customer in an attempt to scale the company at the lowest cost, similar to “self-service” support, chatbots, and automated call centers? Possibly these tasks are just unintended consequences of half-thought-through software. The incentives aren’t there for companies to make these go away. Why spend a fortune to make a product clean up after itself when you can leave the user to do it for free? Worst of all, perhaps these behaviors are malicious. A sort of psychological planned obsolescence to annoy us into buying more stuff.

You can make these nags go away: by being a good consumer. Buy more services, sign up for extra storage, refresh your devices each year. When I watch my friends and colleagues delight in new purchases, I wonder what pleases them more: the new features or the removal of nags? Rather than new capabilities, they have a brand-new device, updates already applied, without a backlog of maintenance. Not yet, of course. That will happen gradually over months and years, just in time to buy a new device to make it all go away and for the cycle to continue. This is the symbiotic relationship we have with our gadgets now. For all the power technology companies have, they still need us to keep devices running and usable. For years we’ve been told we should worry about computers stealing our jobs, but sometimes it feels more like we’re taking theirs.