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Email contains a paradox, like these grasshoppers: Going faster doesn’t mean you’ll get less. In fact, it might mean that you’ll get even more, because email responds to your presence, just like the grasshoppers.

What you need to do is both become more efficient at processing email and at the same time decrease the number of times that you check email each day.

For if you choose to be almost immediately responsive with email, then you will get less long-term and important non-email stuff done.

Grieving my Lord; displeasing the One whose opinion most matters.Dragging into the mud Christ's sacred reputation.Loss of reward and commendation from God.Having to one day look Jesus in the face at the judgment seat and give an account of why I did it. Forcing God to discipline me in various ways. Following in the footsteps of men I know of whose immorality forfeited their ministry and caused me to shudder. List of these names: Suffering of innocent people around me who would get hit by my shrapnel (a la Achan).Untold hurt to Nanci, my best friend and loyal wife. Loss of Nanci's respect and trust.Hurt to and loss of credibility with my beloved daughters, Karina and Angela. ("Why listen to a man who betrayed Mom and us?")If my blindness should continue or my family be unable to forgive, I could lose my wife and my children forever.Shame to my family. (The cruel comments of others who would invariably find out.) Shame to my church family.Shame and hurt to my fellow pastors and elders. List of names: Shame and hurt to my friends, and especially those I've led to Christ and discipled. List of names: Guilt awfully hard to shake—even though God would forgive me, would I forgive myself?Plaguing memories and flashbacks that could taint future intimacy with my wife. Disqualifying myself after having preached to others. Surrender of the things I am called to and love to do—teach and preach and write and minister to others. Forfeiting forever certain opportunities to serve God. Years of training and experience in ministry wasted for a long period of time, maybe permanently. Being haunted by my sin as I look in the eyes of others, and having it all dredged up again wherever I go and whatever I do. Undermining the hard work and prayers of others by saying to our community "this is a hypocrite—who can take seriously anything he and his church have said and done?"Laughter, rejoicing and blasphemous smugness by those who disrespect God and the church (2 Samuel 12:14). Bringing great pleasure to Satan, the Enemy of God. Heaping judgment and endless problems on the person I would have committed adultery with. Possible diseases (pain, constant reminder to me and my wife, possible infection of Nanci, or in the case of AIDS, even causing her death, as well as mine.) Possible pregnancy, with its personal and financial implications. Loss of self-respect, discrediting my own name, and invoking shame and lifelong embarrassment upon myself.

From Hugh Evan Hopkins, Charles Simeon of Cambridge (Eerdmans, 1977), 123-4:Although he wrote so many letters Simeon was very well aware how much better it was, if possible, to talk rather than write, especially when a 'delicate or much-controverted point' arose. With his usual sensitivity to the feelings of others, he said, "If I speak with a man, I can stop when I see it is doing harm; I can soften off the truth so as not to fly in the face of his cherished views...Written words convey ideas, convey sentiments, but they cannot really convey exact feelings."Simeon was a thinker who also 'felt' a great deal. He wrote when there was no other way of communicating with a person, but realised all the time the many limitations of letters, particularly in expressing emotions: "You cannot hesitate upon paper; you cannot weep upon paper; you cannot give upon paper the tone of love; you cannot look kindness upon paper," though he tried his hardest to do so. At any rate, the difficulties and drawbacks in communication in those days do not seem to have deterred him from putting his pen to paper almost every day.