Every time I log on to email since I’ve been a college student, I have around 10 messages waiting for me. I’m on every email list, every club page, and every interest group you could sign up for. Since computers are a source of stress for me (unless I’m watching Netflix…), whenever I have things like email or long texts to respond to, I go into super efficient mode. Email is kind of a necessary, super convenient evil for me. I have to do it, I would never stop doing it, it really does help me with school and social life, but in the back of my head it’d be nice if it weren’t such a part of our society.

When I do email, I sit straight up and block out what’s going on around me until I’ve dealt with all the new messages. It really has felt since arriving on campus like you miss out if you don’t pay attention to your email. To become a Mountain Club Guide, I need to be on top of club email blasts; to do my homework, a lot of the time I receive and hand in assignments over email. Even social events on weekends I wouldn’t know about if I didn’t pay attention to my messages. I group them all into different “folders” – school, clubs, events, info, travel, personal, etc., so I basically just try to get them out of my inbox. This method reflects pretty well my feelings toward email, in general – just trying to get it out of the way as soon as possible.

I don’t know how to stop my negative feelings toward email. Sometimes the influx of messages is just too much for any information to get through to me – but how do I, or we, change that?