There was a time I plowed through my email with reckless abandon, sending replies and forwards peppered with insight and wit. A bad week saw my inbox rise to 10 emails, and even those emails inspired some OCD-induced anxiety.

Now I deal with email on a triage system. Those emails that are life and death get a response. The rest linger in inbox purgatory not knowing the salvation of a response nor the damnation of a deletion. Merlin Mann’s inbox zero seems like some cruel joke.

The pundits of the pipes have already declared for the next generation that email is already dead. They do their communication not only through IM, but Facebook and MySpace. Maybe I was born a generation too early.