Professor Donald Knuth is a professor emeritus at Stanford University and a 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize of computer science, and I love this note of his from back in the day.
I don’t know when exactly it was written but I suspect it’s been decades. And it’s just as accurate today as it was then.
Email (let’s drop the hyphen) [Don Knuth’s Stanford website] – “Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.”
I also like this quote:
`I don’t even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.’ — Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker