email bankruptcy

Yesterday on the Today show, I listened to a guest talking about business etiquette… the subject of email came up, and the host asked about how to handle it when you were swamped with emails in your inbox.

This dude had a very creative answer: declare email bankruptcy!

I thought that was ingenious! According to this guy, if you get completely overwhelmed by emails and cannot see any way to get to the bottom of the stack, you simply set a reply to all emails that reads

“I am overwhelmed by the number of emails in my inbox and am, therefore, declaring email bankruptcy. If your email was important, please resend it and I will commit to responding and will do my very best to keep up with my emails in the future. Thank you for understanding”

WOW! What a great idea… For a guy who gets about 100 emails a day (many of my associates receive 250 or more!), that just seemed like a really good idea… for my part, I have never gotten so far behind that it seemed overwhelming… but a co-worker told me just yesterday that he had worked for 4 ½ hours to pare his inbox down from 975 emails to 225, then fell asleep at the keyboard… only to awaken 6 hours later to find the number had exploded back to 437!

So I told my friend about this email bankruptcy thing… and he got tears in his eyes! It was the first real ray of hope he had seen in several weeks!

And it made me think… how much more overwhelmed are people everyday by the weight of the world… how much more stressful is the burden of sin on your friends and coworkers? They need to know about the liberty that comes through declaring spiritual bankruptcy.

It is only then that God can begin to fill us up with Him... when we admit our own inability to cope or deal... when we finally, completely admit our own emptyness.

Blessings!