Bad Things come in kilobytes

Technology is a double-edged sword. On the positive side, it helps me get work done faster. On the negative side, it helps everyone else get work done faster. It's an eternal race to see who manages to pass the burden of work to the other party first. At least, that's how it seems after almost two months in the office.

The first thing I do every morning is to guess how many emails are lying in wait for me in my inbox. The second is to feel my blood pressure fluctuate according to how far off the mark -and in what direction- my estimate was; I haven't had a right guess so far. As is often the case in life, quantity doesn't necessarily tell the entire story. I could get half a dozen irrelevant emails that wouldn't cause me to break a sweat, or a single one-liner that would consign me to a morning of frantic file-searching. Life can be devious like that.

Based on my experience so far, I've realised that there are some common observations about emails:

• The bigger the size of the email, the more time you'll end up spending on it
• The length of the email is usually inversely proportional to the authority of the person sending it.
• Bosses only send two types of emails: those that require none of your time, and those that require at least half of your day.
• Beware of ppl who send you emails that are cc-ed to your boss.
• If you want someone to get something done, send an email and cc it to his boss.
• The amount of work that gets done via email is inversely proportional to the number of ppl in the address list.
• An exception to the above occurs when the ppl in the address list include bosses.
• Never reply to an email before your boss does.
• Never delete an email just because your boss hasn't replied to it.
• Never delete an email just because your boss has replied to it.

There's more, but this'll do for now. After all, I just ran out of caffeine. Bugger...