Email seems to be the life blood of people my age.  In a sense, it’s almost like an answering machine: Leave a message and I’ll email you back.

I remember the daily routine of each day at work.  Walk in the door, log on to the computer, and download all those new messages.  Sometimes, reading email would supersede pouring my first cup of coffee, a definite indicator of where my priorities stood.

It seemed my addiction to email outpaced my addiction to coffee, and after thinking about it for a while, I now understand why.  Email helps define your daily task list, and even prioritizes it.  If there are questions from customers, they had to be answered first.  After all, if the customer called you on the phone, you’d be hard pressed to leave them hanging about the status of their project.  Of course, maybe that’s why we use email, so we don’t have to get answers immediately!

Then there are those daily industry briefings that keep you abreast of the recent activities in your field.  They kind of ease you into your daily grind, giving you relevant subject material for the water cooler.  Then there’s the interoffice memos from your boss and coworkers and the invitation to a staff meeting that starts in 15 minutes.  If you hadn’t read your email first thing, you would have missed the meeting.

Part of this addiction stemmed from the fact that email was our primary source of communication.  There was no need to take correspondence notes, as the correspondence was all there: graphs, charts, pictures, spreadsheets, accompanying documents, etc.  No faxes to reference, to memos to mail, a conversation was bundled together within a single email.

Microsoft’s Outlook took precedence over my established routine.  A post from the Monster Blog touches on the fact that we rely on Outlook as our primary correspondence provider, and some people can’t live without it.  Another blogger has stopped just short of setting up a support group for email addicts.

Interestingly enough though, there is another study that finds the opposite.

So addicts unite, you are not alone!  What are your Outlook addict confessions?

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