Sometimes I get the feeling that a large, but unstated reason why we start using new services is to escape the old ones.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently with regards to Twitter as a direct messaging platform. I’ve written before how I find the 140 character limit very useful to me because it means I don’t have to BS, and that the people talking to me don’t have to BS. But on a larger scale, I also like Twitter because simply not as many people try to (or can) directly communicate with me through it, as they do with say, email.

Because Twitter has a closed DM system (both users have to be following one another for it to work) it limits the number of people who can send you these messages. Email, of course, doesn’t have such restrictions. And while that initially allowed it to flourish, it also is pushing it towards the brink of being out of control for many people. And I’m not talking about spam here, I’m talking about straight-up normal email messages.

Certainly, it’s not true for everyone. But we here in the tech sphere are usually early adopters both in good and bad ways. We get to see and try out cool stuff first, but some of the downsides of tech also find there way to us first. And I really believe that email overload is a downside that everyone will eventually have to deal with as time goes forward. It is simply a dominant form of communication now, and more people and services are using it more often to take care of a range of things.

So what do we do? Well, many of us have multiple email addresses to try and cut through the noise. The reason for that is really the same for why many of us use Twitter for those direct communications – there isn’t as much noise, so it’s easier respond. But neither of those are real solutions, they’re just us running away from the problem. And at the rate at which Twitter is growing, you can imagine that the same problem will creep up there eventually as well. The DM follow barrier seems to protect us, but you can’t very well use that for everything because sometimes people that you don’t know are going to need to get in touch with you, and you will want them to.

I don’t have an answer for this, and despite a lot of talk about startups working on this problem, I don’t think anyone really has a solution, because I’m not sure that there is one. The real problem is that communication in general has become way too easy in this day and age. You used to have to write letters by hand and send them via messengers to people. That could take weeks or longer. It was a natural barrier. Now we can send emails, IMs, tweets, etc, in seconds. And because of that, the amount of time people are willing to wait for a response is shrinking too.

But even if people were willing to wait longer for a response, it wouldn’t come, because as I’ve experienced, if I don’t respond to an email in the first day after it’s sent, I won’t respond at all. It’s not because I’m an asshole. It’s because I get the same size avalanche of email to respond everyday. Actually, it gets bigger everyday.

The solutions that people seem to be working on are to make communication even faster, and more spread out to other devices, so you can always respond. But that will only exacerbate the core problem that I’m talking about: Communication has become to easy.

Could I take the time to respond to each and every email? Maybe. But I would go insane. And more importantly, I would get exactly zero work done in a day. So instead, quite often, I just don’t respond. Some people understand when I see them at social events later and they confront me on it. Others don’t. I always use the ‘way too much email’ excuse, but it’s not an excuse, it is actually, a fact.

Sometimes I want to go all Gordon Gekko and set up an auto-responder that says something along the lines of “I look at a hundred deals a day. I pick one.” That ratio seems about right. For every 100 or so emails I look at, I respond to about one.

But the bigger problem is that I see myself more and more missing emails that I really should respond to. These aren’t vital (I still respond to those), but they’re ones that on a slow day I would respond to. But I no longer live in a world of slow days, and so I never respond, even though I’d like to. I push them to tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes. It annoys me, but I quickly forget about it when the next email that I should respond to comes in. And it goes on…

Inbox Zero is a myth. And soon it will be a book about a myth. Really, it’s a term that geeks use so we can convince ourselves that we’re winning the battle against communication overload. We’re not winning. We’re just selectively forgetting certain emails, half-responding to others, and if worse comes to worse, switching communication platforms. That’s not winning, that’s running. The problem is that we’re going to have to keep running faster for that to work. Not even Usain Bolt is fast enough for that to ultimately work.

My point is just to say that if you don’t get a response from me, I’m not intentionally being rude, it’s just the reality of my situation. And I fear it’s a reality we are all headed for. And if you get an email back from me with something like, “I look at several hundred emails a day. I respond to one.” Well, then you know the situation has gotten really dire.