How to Live without E-mail

The recent outage of Gmail messed up the rhythm of my day much like a lot of other people. I have other e-mail addresses, but I use Gmail for most of my day-to-day correspondence as well as communicating with clients.

When I have articles I need to edit, they’re sent to me via Gmail. If I have a question for someone I work with, odds are good I use Gmail to communicate with them. I also use Gmail to send queries to publications.

So when the service went down, I was a little bit beside myself, not knowing what to do with my day or how I was going to accomplish it without e-mail.

It’s funny how quickly we go from a thing barely existing to having it feel completely necessary, isn’t it? (I got my first e-mail account about 13 years ago, which isn’t that long to go from cool and handy to completely indispensible.)

What to do When Technology Fails

Whether it’s Gmail, Twitter or your company’s web server, from time to time technology will fail. It just does that. There’s no way we can control when it will happen or how long we will be without it when it’s gone.

And while in some situations there are workarounds — I can always e-mail clients from another address if need be, for example — sometimes you’re just stuck. You can’t get any work done at all, or at least not what you expected to get done.

It’s a good idea to have some projects in the back of your mind that you can do without the aid of your Internet connection, your e-mail program, maybe even without electricity (says the girl who was stuck at home without power for three days earlier this year).

That way when the unthinkable happens you’ll know what you could be doing rather than stewing about the work you aren’t able to get done.

Some ideas:

• Cleaning out paper files
• Organizing/purging books
• Cleaning out drawers or other clutter from the office space
• Making phone calls if the phone is working and you have access to numbers
• Writing longhand (it’s a lot of fun to do this if you never or rarely do)
• Long-range planning
• Brainstorming projects
• Catching up on reading
• Thinking about/outlining new article ideas

Not having your e-mail is inconvenient, but in the vast majority of cases it is not the end of the world. If you have an alternative way of contacting people, you can let them know of the tech troubles you’re having; most people have been there and will be understanding.

Just make sure that if you had any vital projects or deadlines during the downtime, you work as hard and as fast (while still producing quality work, of course) as you can to get things to people as close to when they were expecting them as possible.

You may just find that working without e-mail or access to the Internet makes you so focused that you deliberately take yourself offline from time to time to get things done.