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We desperately need to ask ourselves, and those around us, to revisit the purpose of email. Given what we know about the importance of flow to productive work, and how multi-tasking is largely a myth, is it worth the constant stream of minor interruptions?

We’ve overloaded email with so many meanings that it has imploded as a communication medium. Need an urgent answer to your question within a few minutes? Fire off a quick email and demand a response! Want to have a long back and forth discussion with several people? Email everyone! Do you have a new theory that you desperately want to explain to someone? Send it to them via email! Got a funny joke or picture you’re dying to share? Email it to the office alias!

When we treat email as the kitchen sink of communication, appropriate for everything, it simply ceases to work at all.

Great piece by Jeff Atwood on the diminishing usefulness of email.

Most of us are pretty busy, just about every day.

Some like it that way — being busy is almost a status symbol, as it shows you’re important and productive and a go-getter and achiever. If you’re in a power meeting and sending emails on your Blackberry and making calls, you must be important, right?

I say we should reject that little game of who’s busier than whom. We should opt out. We should say, “I’d rather find peace of mind, and be able to relax, and really enjoy life, than allow it to pass me by just so I can be ‘productive’ and show everyone how important I am.”

OK, maybe say something shorter instead. Like, “No thanks.”

This is advice that I would be well served to follow.

“Truth is, while most of America might know that 62,000 U.S. military personnel are in theater, they apparently aren’t happy about it. A recent CNN/Opinion Research poll found that support of the war in Afghanistan has hit a new low. Only 39 percent favor U.S. military action in Afghanistan.

But does supporting the overall mission go hand-in-hand with supporting the troops?”

Big government now is the consequence of too little government before,” said Representative Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. “What you have right now, with the government owning companies, is the result of insufficient regulation before.

I’m not generally a big Barney Frank fan, but I agree with this statement.

I thought this was a pretty interesting article on the current role of the Federal Government in the private sector, and how difficult it’s going to be to unwind that role in the future.