Can This Email Possibly Find You Well?
We’re delighted that our new website gives us the opportunity to feature our CCFW faculty. In the coming months, we look forward to showcasing what they’ve been doing in other spaces as well as thoughts they’ll share exclusively here.
Today, we share thoughts from Craig Mattson, who has served a faculty fellow since 2022 and holds the Arthur H. DeKruyter Chair in Faith and Communication here at Calvin University. This piece originally appeared in his SubStack, The Mode/Switch, back in March, and we thought it would be a fun way to introduce you to his always-entertaining and thought-provoking research and scholarship around American work culture.
Hello there, Mode/Switchers!
As soon as I press “Publish” on this newsletter this morning, I’m going for a walk in a nearby woods with a friend to ask how he experienced reading my recent book. I’ll be happy just to take a hike on a cold, sunny morning.
In conversations like this, I ask, “What makes you feel alive in these pages?”
Here’s what makes most people feel not alive: a sub-species of digital overwhelm called email overload.
So this week, in this work-culture newsletter—let’s talk about that. We’ll start with a parable about pickleball.
I learned to play this scrappy game on the driveways of our neighborhood, where nobody takes the score too seriously. How can we? Kids are always dashing across the court, and somebody’s always losing a flip flop, and the ball’s forever rolling towards the gutter. When the shrub at the southeast corner of our driveway interrupts play, we yell “Bush-Do!”—which is code for a re-do.
I’m pretty okay at driveway pickleball. I’m less so, as it turns out, when it comes to formal league play.
What surprised me on my first night of league pickleball was that the other players didn’t smile. They didn’t yell, “Good get!” They didn’t allow re-dos. Nothing about the matches reminded me of Thirsty Thursday afternoons in my neighbor’s driveway.
All the intensity made me forget basic rules and make stupid mistakes. I lost every single game I played. Which would have been tough but okay, except that we were playing doubles. My teammates were losing, too. At one point, one of them had finally had all he could take. When I made another unforced error, he yelled out,
“LET IT BOUNCE!”
It’s been a long time since I’ve been on the receiving end of adult indignation.
Later, another player sat down next to me on the bleachers, and we got to talking. He could tell I was discouraged. But I was surprised when he asked me if I played a lot of ping pong. Yeah, sure, but why? “You play pickleball,” he explained, “like a table tennis player.” Show me what you mean, I said. So he took me back out on the now empty court and showed me a few moves that I wasn’t making.
He gave more more game. He helped me make a mode switch. I’d like to do the same for you, not on the court, but in your inbox.
A New Way to Frame the Problem
After that mildly traumatizing pickleball game I told you about above—”LET IT BOUNCE!”—I did a couple of sessions with a therapist-in-training. Probably sounds excessive. Seriously? A bush-cut Boomer yells at you—and you need therapy?
But my therapist did help me understand Relational Frame Theory (RFT), which is this week’s “study,” even though it actually involves hundreds and hundreds of well-researched studies. RFT is extraordinarily well-grounded in experimental research. But I bring it up here because it offers ideas for how to be your complicated self, not just when you’re returning a pickleball, but also when you’re returning an email.
My big takeaway was: don’t turn an observation about what’s happening in your inbox into a fixed idea of who you are as an inboxer.
“My big takeaway was: don’t turn an observation about what’s happening in your inbox into a fixed idea of who you are as an inboxer.”
For example, here’re some observations I’ve made about email experience:
Responding to emails has frequently taken a lot of painstaking effort.
An absolutely empty inbox has, once or twice, given me remarkable satisfaction.
The rate of email in my inbox often exhausts me.
At first glance, those look like fairly objective observations about my inbox experience. But such observations can quickly slide from self-descriptions to self-concepts.
I am a painstaking emailer who never lets a message go unanswered.
I am an email processor, and I’ll only be happy after processing every single email.
I am a victim of vast institutional proliferations of emails.
See what happens? These aren’t just things that I’ve noticed. They’re things I am.
When that guy yelled at me on the pickleball court, I should have realized that he was only a part of my on-the-court experience. He really was a bit of a sod. But he wasn’t the whole game. There were other things going on.
When your inbox pings, those emails do require painstaking labor. But each email is only a part of your working community’s experience. There really are too many of them! But they aren’t the whole game for you. There are other things going on in your working life.
The trick is not to treat what’s happening to you in a moment as the whole of your life.
A Mode Switch Worth Making
My book recommends treating email as a sacred encounter. That sounds lofty and impractical, like trying to wave hello to every car you pass on the interstate.
But I think that, even in very transactional email exchanges, there’s a part of you that should pull back, put a finger to your lips, and whisper, “How can I give to this person in this moment? What do they actually need?”
Last week, I had coffee with a friend who was holding a dog-eared copy of my book. She told me she liked it well enough. But she thought that sometimes I was naive about how bad email actually is. She told me about a client of hers who, in a single day, sent 183 emails. I think I have that number right. It was a lot of emails. At first, my friend tried to respond to all the messages in her usual gracious, resourceful way.
But as they kept pouring in, she finally sent a note with only three words:
STOP SENDING EMAILS!
In that moment, her blunt words were a sort of gift—exactly the clarity the client needed. The necessary thing was not to be as sweet as she possibly could be in an inbox. The necessary thing was to develop the most flexible, adaptable version of her emailing self so she was ready to be present to whatever came over the net.
Her blunt message actually reminds me of my teammate who yelled at me. Maybe the problem was not that he yelled at me. Maybe the problem was that I received his message as a message about who I was, rather than just a needed perspective in a changeable and complicated game.
Don’t do your email like it’s table tennis. Or badminton. Or racquetball. Do it like it’s richly varied personal encounter.
