2009: LIE

My favorite act of self-improvement for the year 2009 was to become a better email correspondent, even if with only a few friends and family members. This was not mere happenstance but rather the effect of a new system, one that I learned from Coworker Shafik. The system is called LIE, the law of infinite email.

The law of infinite email is a system that, if followed will just a modicum of diligence, will transform a person, however lazy and prone to procrastination, into a reliable correspondent. No emails left to idle for weeks or months in an inbox; no threads left to end in silence without resolution. And yet the LIE system is so simple. The way it works is to pre-establish a definitive deadline for responding to an email within a LIE thread. The recipient of an email must respond within some agreed upon amount of time, say one week, even if his response says nothing more than something to the effect of: "I'm too busy to write." That's it.

It's stupid simple, and it works. The point is that the email thread is forced to continue despite the inevitable periods of extreme busyness which we all suffer from time to time. Being forced with a deadline into writing something, however trivial, makes maintaining a thread habitual and therefore easier. (Whereas a somewhat neglected email thread becomes easy to transform, with a little bit of time, into a totally neglected email thread.) LIE may decrease the quality of individual emails, but the value of an ongoing correspondence lies not with writing exceptionally but writing with regularity.

I doubt that I need to sell the idea of regular correspondence. The importance of cultivating meaningful relationships with others who live far away is something that most people feel very keenly. This is especially the case these days when communication tools such as cell phones and Facebook too often to promote casual convenience over substance. Casual convenience is worthwhile in the right contexts, but it does not substitute for meaningfulness. An ongoing email thread is a great simulation of tried and true technology: the pen-and-paper letter via postal delivery. As media, both do not exhibit bias in regards to limiting the depth to which a discussion may delve.

One of the interesting aspects of LIE is how others with whom I've talked about LIE have gone off and created their own LIEs with others. I very much like how others are rekindling the dying art of correspondence, too.

The only drawback of LIE that I've discovered is that it makes most of my non-LIE correspondence seem woefully unreliable by comparison. (My fault.) This remains an unsolved problem for the year 2010.