How-to-Use-Email

Email can be a useful, and even a necessary tool, but it also has its issues.((Header image provided by Abby Anaday.)) And as might be surprising, one of these issues has to do with its security. Send the wrong thing across email at the wrong time, and you might find yourself picking up the pieces rather than writing up that next research project.

Where Is Email Secure?

When you connect to your email, you need a username (probably your email address itself) and a unique, hard-to-guess password. You may also have decided that multifactor authentication is a good idea. So, to connect to your email, you’ll also need whatever additional authentication factor (e.g., a six-digit code, an app notification, a hardware token).

Email is ubiquitous in biblical studies— sometimes too much so.((Header image provided by Thunderbird.)) But there are several principles you can use to get out of your inbox more benefits and fewer downsides.

In the bigger picture, the specific tools you use to access your email is less important than that you use it according to such principles. Doing so will help make sure you’re using it and not being used by it. And you can implement these principles in various ways depending on how you prefer to send and receive email.

In biblical studies as in other knowledge work fields, email is everywhere.((Header image provided by Joanna Kosinska.)) But it’s prominence and frequency far outstrip its importance.

Because of this, email and similar tools have a distinctive capacity to pull you away from more essential activities into less essential ones. Thankfully, however, you can minimize email’s downsides while you maximize its value for cases where you can’t readily avoid it. So, needing to email a journal editor about publishing an article needn’t leave you paying excess “email tax.”

Email is easy, cheap, and flexible.((Header image provided by Proton.)) Those factors make it a persuasive default for how coordination happens in knowledge work.

The only problem is that these same factors sometimes make email even more a liability than it is an asset. But the fact that email creates such liabilities doesn’t mean there aren’t clear ways to reduce them.

Preferring Systematization to Spontaneity

Cal Newport has discussed these problems extensively and suggested an intriguing solution.((Cal Newport, A World without Email: Find Focus and Transform the Way You Work Forever ( affiliate disclosure; New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2021).)) As a tool for facilitating the flow of knowledge work, email falters badly because it’s too easy, too cheap, and too flexible. It facilitates high volumes of messages that then require similarly high levels of time and attention to process.

Email is a deeply entrenched protocol within biblical studies. Partly for that reason, it presents a constant choice of which problem with it is better.

Biblical studies isn’t a matter of “(s)he who writes the most email wins.” But that obvious truth that can still get obscured all too easily.

For all its benefits, email presents definite challenges. But those challenges are mainly ones of degree rather than kind.

Email can be a useful tool, and sometimes a necessary one. But you need to be careful with using it so you don’t end up being used by it.