I checked out The Minimalist Cooks Dinner by Mark Bittman from the library yesterday so I can review it on The Everyday Cafe. I love good cooking and I love quick dinners, but rarely do they come together at one time in our house. A quick dinner might be tacos or spaghetti with marinara or broiled chicken breasts with Noodle-Roni on the side. Good cooking in our house, on the other hand, takes time and ingredients.
At the same time that I’m anticipating cooking Bittman’s Spanish-Style Shrimp or Steamed Chicken Breasts with Scallion-Ginger Sauce, I’ve been contemplating the state of email, and how I’d love to see a new way of relating to it. I suspect we’ve made email altogether too hard with zero inbox rules and books about email etiquette and cries of horror when someone suggests you might not need email-handling routines that look like Julia Child’s recipe for roast duck with cracklings.
Why not a minimalist approach to email? Keep it simple and flavorful and effective. Don’t put too much hassle or expectation onto it, because just like making dinner, it’s something you have to do almost every day. Leave the complex layered flavor for other settings or only for special occasions.
Here’s what my email minimalism might look like:
Keep things fresh. The minimalist dinner cook uses the freshest ingredients; the email minimalist focuses on what’s most important and delicious too: the latest email. Don’t get caught up thinking that you’re so important someone’s waiting for a reply from an email of three months ago. Archive that stale stuff and get back into the present.
Use only the ingredients you need. In other words, keep it short and snappy. Move your phatic communications — social niceties that is — onto other, more appropriate channels like instant messaging, social networking, and Twitter. Intimacy, coming as it does from many-layered flavors combined with complex tools and methods, is best reserved for other channels and platforms.
Eliminate complex preparations. The email minimalist doesn’t create fancy methods for whipping up (or through) her email. Gmail showed us that searching a big pile of emails is a whole lot easier than laboriously filing them into a sophisticated set of folders.
Stop yourself before you think you’re done. In email, eliminate unnecessary replies. When you reply to an email, there’s a good chance that’ll get a reply, so replies engender more email. Just don’t do it. In minimalist cooking, another step or ingredient just might make the end result taste better, but remember what you’re trying to achieve: good results in a minimum of time and effort.
Save the multi-course meals for another time and place. Complex discussions move elsewhere — onto a wiki or bulletin board or into an actual meeting, virtual or in-person. Minimalist email is no place to hold back and forth discussions that benefit from archiving or synchronous discussion or both. This is the equivalent of eating a fancy French meal at Le Central instead of cooking it yourself… because you’re worth it, and because who has the time to cook a fancy French meal?
Lower your expectations. A minimalist dinner can be just as yummy — or yummier — than something you slaved away at all day Sunday for a special family supper. But sometimes you just have to accept that if you’ve only got 30 minutes and four or five ingredients, there are some limitations on what you can achieve. Same with email minimalism. You’ve got only so much time and brainpower each day to devote to email… so don’t expect all your messages will be strikingly well written or even that you’ll reply to everything that possibly could deserve a reply.
Go maximalist for special occasions. Break out all your best ingredients, tools, and methods when the occasion warrants. When you’re starting a new job, celebrating Valentine’s Day, or saying “welcome back” to a traveling spouse, you might pull out a recipe with 15 ingredients that takes two hours. If you’re trying to win that job, tell your Valentine how much you love him, or letting your spouse know how much you miss her, make your email as long and beautiful and French gourmet as you want.
What’s your approach to handling email? Minimalist, Julia Child, or something else?
4 Comments
For me, cooking is like email in this sense: I don’t like doing either, but I can when I have to.
As far as niceties in email, it’s a great way to get more into “friendship” with people who are barely on the periphery. After that, it becomes redundant.
I’m always amazed with Outlook at how convoluted it is to *search everything*.
Just let me search everything. I have no idea where the mail is. I’m going to do one search that gives me too much and then narrow it. Make it fast, and make it easily accessible.
It’s taken me a while to get comfortable with search as my main way to find things, but I’ll never go back.
Chris, you’re right that niceties are important with acquaintances but as you get to know people and interact with them in different channels, they can be eliminated.
I used to be very Cook’s Illustrated with my email–precise, by the book, completely in control. Now I’m pretty much _White Trash Cooking_. If nothing too big catches on fire, I’m doing ok.
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