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Joe Robinson on an "E-tool Bill of Rights"

An E-Tool Bill of Rights

With the surfeit of inbound communication unleashed by our always-on culture, life balance pundit Joe Robinson thinks it's time to get constitutional about our rights as overwhelmed e-citizens. I can definitely get behind a couple of the "articles" he's laid out:

In the spirit of Madison and Jefferson, it's time to reclaim liberty, not to mention productivity, with some boundary setting and rules. It's time to redraw the line between work and home, and between legitimate office communications and junk, with an E-Tool Bill of Rights...

Article 3: The people shall have the right to switch off email notification and other noisemakers and instead check messages at designated times to prevent attention deficit...

Article 4: There shall be no requirement of immediate response to messaging, unless urgency is determined.

Your mileage, like my own, will vary on some of these, but I'm always happy to see this thread of conversation picked up; I regret that we still have a ways to go before some of these would be ratified by the extant electronic body politic.

[ Thanks, barrett55 ]

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Merlin Mann is an independent writer, speaker, and broadcaster. He’s best known for being the guy who created the website you’re reading right now. He lives in San Francisco, does lots of public speaking, and helps make cool things like You Look Nice Today, Back to Work, and Kung Fu Grippe. Also? He’s writing this book, he lives with this face, he suffers from this hair, he answers these questions, and he’s had this life. So far.

Merlin’s favorite thing he’s written in the past few years is an essay entitled, “Cranking.”

 
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