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'No, You Can't Ignore Email. It's Rude.' (nytimes.com)
Yes, we're all overwhelmed with email. One recent survey suggested that the average American's inbox has 199 unread messages. But volume isn't an excuse for not replying. Ignoring email is an act of incivility, reads an opinion piece. From the story: "I'm too busy to answer your email" really means "Your email is not a priority for me right now." That's a popular justification for neglecting your inbox: It's full of other people's priorities. But there's a growing body of evidence that if you care about being good at your job, your inbox should be a priority. When researchers compiled a huge database of the digital habits of teams at Microsoft, they found that the clearest warning sign of an ineffective manager was being slow to answer emails. Responding in a timely manner shows that you are conscientious -- organized, dependable and hardworking. And that matters. In a comprehensive analysis of people in hundreds of occupations, conscientiousness was the single best personality predictor of job performance. (It turns out that people who are rude online tend to be rude offline, too.)
I'm not saying you have to answer every email. Your brain is not just sitting there waiting to be picked. If senders aren't considerate enough to do their homework and ask a question you're qualified to answer, you don't owe them anything back. How do you know if an email you've received -- or even more important, one you're considering writing -- doesn't deserve a response? After all, sending an inappropriate email can be as rude as ignoring a polite one. [...] Whatever boundaries you choose, don't abandon your inbox altogether. Not answering emails today is like refusing to take phone calls in the 1990s or ignoring letters in the 1950s. Email is not household clutter and you're not Marie Kondo. Ping!
I'm not saying you have to answer every email. Your brain is not just sitting there waiting to be picked. If senders aren't considerate enough to do their homework and ask a question you're qualified to answer, you don't owe them anything back. How do you know if an email you've received -- or even more important, one you're considering writing -- doesn't deserve a response? After all, sending an inappropriate email can be as rude as ignoring a polite one. [...] Whatever boundaries you choose, don't abandon your inbox altogether. Not answering emails today is like refusing to take phone calls in the 1990s or ignoring letters in the 1950s. Email is not household clutter and you're not Marie Kondo. Ping!
199 unread emails? Not me.
I must be doing something right, or are they doing something wrong?
An average of 199 unread messages and all of them unwanted newsletters and spam. I'd hardly call it uncivil to not spend my time on them. Rather, the act of spamming others with digital detritus seems to be the greater act of incivility.
Let me correct the thinking in the title here. "Yes I can. No it isn't." There we go.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
If you want me to reliably respond to email, the first step is to pass a law declaring open season on spammers, with a bounty of $1,000 per head, and arm everybody in the world with shotguns. :-)
I would be thrilled to have only 199 unread email messages. In fact, I have 3,592 unread email messages, despite numerous attempts to blacklist spammers, bulk delete spam, unsubscribe from various email lists that companies have put me on without my consent, etc. The volume of garbage is so extreme relative to the actual signal that I've just about given up on email entirely. I try to catch important emails from people I know, but I make no guarantees. The odds of an email never even being noticed until it is too late are probably at least 30% at this point.
Heck, lately, the spam has been coming more and more from our own federal government, whose "We the People" website makes no attempts to validate email addresses whatsoever, resulting in some weeks getting dozens of "Thank You For Your Message" reports from an email alias that I have never used or given out publicly (same username, different well-known hostname). When even the federal IT department can't avoid being part of the problem, it's time to give up on the entire delivery system.
The same is also true for the telephone. When I get calls, unless the number is one that I recognize, I do not answer. Ever. If anybody wants to reach me, they can either:
All other delivery methods are on a best-effort basis, and should be considered unreliable, at best.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I think learning to efficiently deal with an increasing influx of communication is just part of going down the leadership road. The more responsibility you have, the more people are going to reach out to you, and the more shit you get CCed on because someone is hoping you'll jump in and fight their battle or just wants to cover their ass.
Like the summary says, you really shouldn't just abandon your inbox and hope it all sorts itself out. People will label you as "doesn't check his email" and just track you down in person when they really have to, but will also start going around you .. and being seen as an obstacle isn't exactly great for long term career success.
Eventually good managers figure out a way to deal with it.
The whole business of developing etiquette from scratch in the age of electronic communications is interesting as hell. It used to be that people thought of email as a typical letter, delivered nearly as slowly as actual physical mail. Now it is merely the world's slowest form of instant message.
One skill needed for effective management is good organization.
An overflowing inbox is a sign of difficulty with this skill.
How hard is it to "archive"? You don't have to have a fancy folder structure. Most email applications today have an "archive" feature.
If you can't deal with it now, send a quick note saying you can't, and move on. Then archive the email.
Sorry, Bob. You work 10 metres down the hall. Don't send me an "important" e-mail that needs an immediate response. Walk down the hall and tell me. I view your e-mail as A) an attempt to avoid me, B) making work an isolated place, and most important C) an attempt at sabotaging my job performance by hoping won't check e-mail quick enough to get it.
Also, Susan, I don't need your two e-mails a day about mundane office details. I don't care if somebody didn't replace the sugar in the sugar cup at the coffee machine. Or somebody left the little window in the hallway cracked open.
I read/reply to email if and when I want to. Same goes for text messages and voice mails.
It's my device and my time and I will use them as I please.
Make sure you have return receipt turned off on your email client. That way they'll never know if you read it.
I once had a cow orker who loved to bcc every manager they could, to prove how valuable they were to the company.
If I received one of these emails, I would compose 5-10 page replies including every detail regarding the email.
Sometimes I would include documentation from a vendor showing how wrong the original sender was in their assumptions and requirements.
Managers were quick to tell the original cow orkers that they be removed from the bcc chain because all that technical talk just made them itchy.
Personal email? I'll read it if it's from a friend or family member, or someone trying to send me money as part of a class action lawsuit, otherwise I'll usually scan the subject and delete it. I've realized most email "vendors" don't know how to actually block spam in a useful way.
If you want something from me, send me an email. I'll read it during work hours, maybe today, maybe tomorrow.
If you need me to read it faster, send me an SMS. I'll read it in an hour if I am not sleeping.
If you need something from me RIGHT NOW, call me. As a bonus, you will know immediately whether I can talk to you right now and whether I now know about your problem.
Email conversation is slow, even if I reply you instantly, you will probably take some time to reply, which will stretch out our conversation (say, 5 emails each) to a whole day or maybe two days. So, if you are writing an email, then it is not that urgent to you.
I don't think a timely response is as important as one you have considered. Once it is out there, its gone and you can't take it back.
With email there is some time to respond, not immediately unless it really has to be that way.
When people see thought in the response it's a good sign you've considered what they had to say.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I’ve got one particular coworker who often emails me a question multiple times over the course of a few months - even though I have almost always already answered the question in a response to her first email. She loses track, and rather than checking whether I’ve already answered... asks the same question again.
Wasting my time with pointless emails like that is far ruder than me not responding with a third or fourth or fifth email containing information I’ve already sent more than once.
And yes, when I answer a repeat I do append the first message and point out that I did answer weeks ago... it doesn’t deter her. She is seriously vapid. Many of us wonder how she has held onto her job (and no, none of the things which probably have popped into your head there can explain this one).
#DeleteChrome
You don’t have a right to my time or attention unless we have an established social or business relationship. I have a pretty good multi-layer spam filtering system. That takes care of 90% of the incoming mail. It takes a few moments to highlight and permanently delete most of the rest a few times a day. That leaves a handful for me to actually read and sometimes reply. Damn, perhaps I am organized.
As far as I know 48 hours is the default time period to allow for an email recipient to respond.
"... you just have to answer mine. "
Would it be rude to simply assume the author's article is BS, and simply not read it? Asking for a troll.
And I can even add you to my spam-filter if you are wasting my time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Full quotes. Chronological mess. 98% noise, repetition and footers with bullshit disclaimers. Basically unreadable. If you're not a paying customer, those go straight to the waste-bin. If you are a paying customer I'll reply tersely in the hopes that you will learn how email is written. It's not my fault that Mickeysuck fubared email with default fullquotes and people who were to dumb and/or lazy to change their settings in Outlook back in 1998 when this degrading of email etiquette started.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The key part of this study is that managers need to be responsive to emails. This makes sense in an organization that uses email to manage people. If your job is something else... then you should be spending only a small amount of time and attention on email.
Both my private addresses as well es my work email are at 0 unread.
I reply to every direct question from a real person I have some kind of contact with or who have valid reason to contact me.
I receive little to no spam. I make sure to unsubscribe the moment I get mail from any mailinglist and my anti-spam measures seem to be strong. Between blacklists and spamgourmet.com I seem to be pretty good at not getting much in the first place.
I will admit though that I'm neither in a management positiin nor do I have a budget people could try to talk me into sending their way.
It would be rude to ignore emails from someone I have a close connection with - I would not want them ignoring my emails. Quid pro quo.. It is not rude to ignore emails that come from (for example) a mailing list or a cc: ALL.
In the workplace I have clearly defined reporting lines: up and down. Those individuals have my attention. For the rest, I don't work for them. Their issues are not my concern.
As for phone calls, the same applies. In the late 80's I was one of the few techies in what was the national branch of a computer manufacturer. Most of the other people in the office were S&M - sales and marketing. When I started, if they wished to ask a question they would have to call (although individuals were frequently away from their desks or out of the office), or walk a floor or two to our office to find someone to talk to face-to-face. In 1989 we were all given mobile phones. After that we were bombarded with calls, directly from sales people, no matter where they or we were. The working day went from being (largely) productive to a constant stream of trivial interruptions from people who found it was easier to make a call, than to find the answer for themselves.
The same applies to email and smartphones. Easier modes of communication "dumb down" many people and dump pressure on others.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
It's prudent exactly because "I don't have time to read your email." translates to "Your email isn't a priority for me at this time.". Technically I do read all my email, at least as far as the sender and subject, but the first thing I'm looking for when I skim it is "Is this email relevant to something that's one of my priorities right now, and if so which one?". If it is, that email has the priority of whatever it's related to and I'll get to replying to it when my priorities permit. Which means if it's a low priority item I won't be working on for some time, don't expect a quick reply. If it's a high priority for you but not for me, either you or your manager need to stop bothering me and go talk to my manager about getting relative priorities adjusted (in fact this should've happened when the priority for the item was set, that this is coming up indicates a severe lack of communication on the part of one or more of the managers involved). I'll be happy to help bring it to my manager's attention, provide estimates on how quickly things can be done and what the effects of shuffling priorities will be, but don't expect me to go upending my priorities without my manager knowing about it and approving it. Note: bug reports already have a (really high) permanent place on my priority list and get a same-day or faster response (if nothing else, indicating how long I think it'll take to nail the cause down and get a handle on a fix). Regular updates on progress and ETA from me are required and I rarely miss sending them out so be really sure you've checked your folders and there really isn't a relevant update before bugging me about progress.
Personal email I handle on the same basis, and I feel absolutely no obligation to respond to email merely because you sent it to me. If I don't respond it's usually because either I don't know you and your email had nothing in it to interest me, or I know you and don't want to talk to you about whatever your email was about (or possibly at all, depending). The exceptions involve things like my being in the ICU in a coma, and if you're close enough friends to expect a response from me you're already on the list of people who'll get notified about things like that in some way.
Yes, I'm an old codger who refuses to be nickel-and-dimed to death by people wanting "just a few minutes of my time". Time is ultimately the only currency we have, and I'm as careful with it as I am with the dollars in my bank accounts. My friends understand this and we've worked out a mutually-acceptable balance. Failing to understand it, in turn, is one of the fastest known ways to get put into my twit filter.
My work inbox has 1700 unread emails. Personal email 20k. Most of them are not personal communications directed specifically at me, though. They are sales come-ons or ship notifications or email group digests, etc.
I wonder just how far from the norm I am? Do other people actually try to organize their emails or just leave them all in the inbox to scroll down like a social media feed?
By including this sig, the copyright holders of this work or collection unreservedly place it in the public domain.
This is what is being said.
When someone accuses you of turning off or leaving your phone at home, it's because your time is not important compared to theirs.
When work does so, it's because working for no pay outside of your actual hours is profitable and totally not slavery so you're a bad person if you don't
When every single email sent to you is expected to be answered no matter what, it is because your attention belongs to others, not yourself, no matter how inane their need for it may be.
If someone is going to accuse you of being rude for *sleeping* seven hours a day when even though you need much more than that they wanted to wake you up midway through: they are trying to slowly and painfully cause an early death by preventing my ability to rest and/or relax. A slow torturous death is still murder and their justification is "because I am more important than you are".
The least they can do is do it to your face, because such a threat to your or your family's life deserves an appropriately violent response.
If, in 2019, not answering someone's email is considered 'incivility', then on what level do we consider spam to be?
Of course a manager would have to answer e-mails, that's part of their job. You'd expect a programmer to program, which would include things like writing code and debugging, and a manager to manage, which would include things like answering e-mails, talking to people and making decisions.
So if answering e-mails is part of your job and you're not doing it well, you're obviously not doing your job well. That doesn't mean that anyone not answering e-mail isn't good at their job. There are certainly a huge number of occupations where answering e-mails is not something you'd want a person to do.
My personal email gets unread for weeks at a time, I usually check it once a month to make sure that my bills get paid. Friends, Family, SO all use text, IM, Facebook,or plain old fashioned phone calls. If it's important, someone will call me about it. If I am am applying for a job or working with my Real Estate agent, then I check it more often. But otherwise, it's one of the last things on my list...
As for Work, Email is a lifeblood of our company. I work at a large company and everything, and I mean everything, is done through email. So, you can imagine that I don't want to even look at email when I am at home unless I have to.
My inbox contains a bunch of chat notifications, some general information from HR, some reports from the automated build system, and absolutely nothing that demands a response.
If people do expect a response, then email is not the best medium any more.
Where have all your letters gone?
Off to Facebook, everyone...
(to the tune of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone")
Communications have split into three:
- friends & family - on facebook, snapchat or whatever
- promotions and ads - in email
- official stuff - invoices, bills, formal notices etc - in email
There is nothing in my personal inbox any more that requires immediate answer. Google helpfully sorts the ads to a special folder to be ignored. I can then read & respond to official mail once a week or as I see fit.
Not answering my friends would be rude. This does not happen on email though.
I remember this conversation with an older worker and it struck me as sensible at the time and very wise now.
Without going full "four yorkshiremen *" on it...
Some years ago people sent typewritten memos; you could get 4, maybe 5 carbon copies if you were lucky - any more and a second copy needed to be typed. Result: you thought long and hard about what was said, kept it brief , and considered exactly to whom you would send the message - every addressee counted.
Then came the photocopier - you could easily send memos to 20, 30 people (more involved negotiation with the custodians of the copier and/or negotiations with the stationery dept.) - people were less rigorous about addressees and the volume of less relevant and less valuable info increased.
Then came email - the cost of sending to hundreds of people was minimal; it was quick and easy. Whilst increased communication helps the 'signal to noise' ratio took a nosedive and we got increasing volumes of decreasing quality messages.
Moving on from that conversation, we have social media where absolute crap is broadcast to the whole world and kept for eternity - but the majority of it is inane, inaccurate, disingenuous and unhelpful.
Seems like we have an analogue to the gas law:
Volume x Quality = Constant
----
* Monty Python -- a classic sketch
Which must make me incredibly rude.
I remain permanently subscribed to a lot of Job boards so I ignore those and related direct emails. I also ignore the Amazon/ CostCo and other emails from online stores.
Paradoxically I do read a lot of the spam, because I never cease to be amazed over the number of hot women I've never heard of wanting my body.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
That non-significant share of colleagues who ignore your emails, possibly pretending they never saw it, are truly annoying. And I am not talking about spam here, but polite non-sociopath emails that are somehow important, in which there are specific questions or calls for action stated to the recipient - some times requiring nothing more than a quick response. Emails that if left unanswered means the project I am in charge of starts grinding to a halt.
Eventually after pulling every possible trick in the book to solve it yourself, you have to escalate and have your boss call that other person's boss, with a lot of negativity following - and the end result (because you were right that person should have responded) (s)he gets the order to help out, which they then do in the most passive aggressive unhelpful manner they can think of. And all the way you are thinking ... why was all this bullthis necessary.
At some point after learning I could never expect any response from some particular ill-mannered person, I would start walking over to their desk immediately after sending that email (unfortunately only works on-site), and if they were not there I would put a post-it note in the middle of their computer screen asking them to please look at some email I just sent. Which improved responses, but you would be surprised how many people just ignore the post-it note - and also how many people will look you in the eyes and say they are going to do something for you, and then proceed by doing exactly zero.
If you need to get in touch with someone remotely then post-it notes obviously do not work, but if you have some colleague there who you are on friendly terms with, if the request is important you could send them an email asking to go have a chat with that person, saying that "hey, so and so sent you an email and asked me to tell you it's really important".
Always respond to emails. Often you can apply 80/20 rule, in which a quick reply is all the recipient needs. Or if the request should not be answered as stated, just quickly respond why - in 70% of cases the request goes away. Even stating "this is not a priority because X, do Y instead" will make most the non-priority stuff just evaporate. Or some times, "I will have to get back to you in about X time" is appropriate, but then you also have to follow up.
99 out of 100 mails I get are pointless. And I'm not even counting spam. It's FYI, it's "just in case you might be interested" CC, and let's not start about all the "funny" ones.
Email as a means of communication is dead for me. You want to communicate with me, you use Skype (professionally) or Discord or Telegram (if private). EMail is something you send to me for archive functionality.
Ignore at your own risk, i.e. at the risk of your request being ignored.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In the naughts it was considered (at least where I live, Central Europe), that it's rude if it takes you longer than 24h to answer. I usually still go by this, but make exceptions for people who are either exceptionally fast or slow.
Today, everyone with an Android phone has an email account and doesn't even understand it: for my parents and grandparents, for example, a mail received is just a phone notification that they don't understand, and thus, ignore... I check and clean my mother inbox regularly, but this kind of thing is far for common...
An email is often a request that is all too easily fired off. Typing and sending an email is incredibly fast but the action required on the other end is considerable. And often the email is sent off without due diligence on the end of the sender, which is incredibly rude, not valuing the receiver's time. Often the sender will not even check their own email for the answer which has been sent time and again, but sender can't remember in short term memory so they fire off another email about "how do I do this again? What's the phone number again? Where can I find this again?"
There are many resources available but sender just thinks it's easier to send an email. It's like googling the human world to them. We've sometimes been so fed up we've even made detailed documents with the steps you need to follow and all of the possible contingencies but you can't find that either or be bothered to read can you?
So naturally the recipient would rather ignore the many requests and wait to be contacted through another medium, whether it be a voice call or in person, to follow through, as a form of vetting.
Fuck off with your shaming.
Twinstiq, game news
When researchers compiled a huge database of the digital habits of teams at Microsoft, they found that the clearest warning sign of an ineffective manager was being slow to answer emails.
A manager manages. They are the interface between the working team and the rest of the world, they have to process email, it's their job. The manager is here so that the other members of the team don't have to respond to outside communication and focus on their own job instead.
When 99 out of 100 e-mails is spam trying to sell me something I will gladly ignore and delete those emails. Not all email requires or deserves a response.
Responding in a timely manner shows that you are conscientious -- organized, dependable and hardworking. And that matters. In a comprehensive analysis of people in hundreds of occupations, conscientiousness was the single best personality predictor of job performance. (It turns out that people who are rude online tend to be rude offline, too.)
Conscientiousness is one of the Big Five, which together with your IQ, can predict work performance quite well. Being conscientious, among other things, implies that you naturally try to respond in a timely manner. But that doesn't mean that forcing yourself to answer emails more rapidly makes you more conscientious, nor that answering emails more rapidly will affect overall work performance. In other words: forcing non-conscientious people to reply quickly may just end up decorrelating reply time from conscientiousness, instead of boosting their overall work performance.
TLDR: Correlations in human behavior tend to change if you try to force new behavioral patterns on them.
He keeps offering me twenty million, and I answer that I'm not interested. I already have enough money. He is now emailing me more. I keep ignoring him. I feel bad now.
Helpful tip for many: if you use Outlook at work, you can set up the junk mail filters to quarantine messages that aren't from you own domain or your contact list. Goodbye tons of marketing emails.
That aside, I have found that colleagues who do not answer relevant work related emails within a day or generally not worth working with. It is just basic time management. I recommend "Time Management for System Administrators" all the time
I understand the catch-22, but I recently decided I will avoid buying things directly from vendors and instead try to get them on Amazon. If I go vendor direct, I invariably get signed up for their chirp of the day email crap no matter how hard I look for opt-out tricks.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
It isn't. And?
So, if I don't think it's worth answering - I've read it and decided it's not a priority for me right now. Haven't abandoned my inbox. Shut the fuck up.
Nawh, it's been around forever. They *did* however polish it to a bright star of social interactions.
Nor will it be important tomorrow or the day after. Deal with it.
And yes, just reading the subject line many times constitutes reading enough of the email to ignore responding.
If I answered every email, I would not get any other work done. Most people cc the whole team for every email, creating huge email chains.
If you are answering all your emails then you are not doing any real work, AKA you are a manager.
This is the digital age's equivalent to a paper pusher.
There's nothing more annoying (in the e-mail world) than getting a non-response response to a reasonable question or request just to make it seem like the ball has changed courts. I consider that a big 'Fuck You'. Unfortunately it is getting all too common. Would it be that hard to just say "I'll need to follow up later.", and maybe even give a date when you might respond?
e-mail (and good old letter writing) is not good for conversations at all. Neither are texts. But that does not necessarily mean you can put it off for days. The advantage of e-mail over a phone conversation, is that there's a trail left, and you can see it in your Inbox or Sent folder. I prefer phone conversations for better understanding of a situation, but I prefer e-mails for follow-up so I can flag them as a To-Do item.
There's nothing rude about calling, especially for business-related conversations. It's a lot easier to understand each other when talking.
You can thank Gates for that bullshit. Much like us in \ instead of / just to be different M$ defaulted to "Reply at the top" rather than the same way. The worst part is it can be impossible to get people to switch because "but da Microsofts dos it so it must be the right way!"
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The point is that if you need something right now, call. We'll talk and maybe I'll ask you to write an email with the details, but normally the urgent matters (server is down etc) do not require that. And the conversation is faster when I do not have to type everything I want to say.
If you write me an email without calling, then I'll assume that this is not very urgent. The reason is that I may not even be in the office right now (and if you call me with an urgent matter, I'll call a coworker and ask them to look into your problem or try to get beck to the office as fast as I can). I may have connected my monitor to another computer and cannot see the notification. And multiple other reasons.
If whatever urgent matter you have requires a lot of details and so requires an email (with attachments etc), write the email and then call me right after you hit "send".
I prefer phone conversation over email. Since email is high latency, I have to think of everything I want to say and then write it, sometimes including some simple algorithms (check this, if it works, do this, if it doesn't then check that) which may be misunderstood etc.
On the other hand, when we are taking on the phone, I can ask you questions (does this work? ok, try it now) and finish the conversation taking up much less time and effort than with the emails.
I sent an email. How long should I wait for the reply before switching to another task? I mean I hate frequent switching, but if the sender takes an hour to reply, I'd rather do something else during that time.
There is another problem with email - it's kind of like UDP - I do not know if you read it. Let's say the server is down and it needs to be fixed ASAP. If I write you an email, I won't even know if you read it - maybe you are away from the PC. On the other hand if I call you and you do not answer, I know for sure that you did not pick up and may call someone else instead of waiting for you to get back to your PC and read the email.
To the person who sends me 5 emails before I arrive in the office each morning, along with immediately followup "did you get this?" --- yes I'm ignoring you. I have other things to do. You send too much email and you're pushy.
Many times I don't respond to an email because I'm stuck. I don't have an answer to the question asked and my only response would be "I don't know what next steps are." And many times the problem takes care of itself before I respond or the issue is no longer an issue (only the important stuff gets done).
I used to work at a very large organization and the volume of email is incredible. People cc you just because. I would receive tons of email that was directed at no-one - directed at "the void." I didn't reply because there were 66 people on the To line - who owns it ? Not me. Thanks for the Notice.
But email to me I generally reply right away. Unless I knew to strategically delay my response because I was given other priorities. And I had a lot going on - so I only read email once every hour or so. It was like a FB/Twitter feed. There's always an update - so I batch processed email. Sorry that I couldn't Like your individual post. I have to prioritize thinking about your problem against my other tasks. Has anything changed in 50 years?!
And sometimes your problem just isn't important enough. suck it.
"An overflowing inbox is a sign of difficulty with this skill." Maybe in your world, but not for many people.
In many (most?) cases this is about good old server-queue theory, with you (the reader of email) being the server. When the workforce is cut over and over, the remaining staff get what used to be many people's workloads. Eventually they can't keep up.
In my case: Before I retired I was working with several (more than 5) wholly distinct intra-coprorate communities -- each with its own email chains and questions and initiatives. I was generally a key participant in each community, meaning my input was required. It took 2-3 hrs/day to work through them on a good day.
But if I was out on vacation or sick or traveling or at training or at a conference, then the email stacked up. When I got back, the backlog was in hundreds or thousands. The normal daily load did not stop to wait for me to catch up. I might throw in a couple more hours for a few days to catch up, but I also needed think time to plan the next project, attend meetings, deal with personnel issues, etc.
So despite best intentions, you fall behind. You can't even scan it to find what is critical. Certainly not enough time to send apology notes. Eventually you give up on that entire tranche -- just delete the hundreds or thousands of lost causes and start fresh. Why delete? In my context if anyone needed my input from that tranche, they would resend it and call or stop by my office to make sure I got to it.
Agreed. My counterpoint to the article - don't send emails demanding other people's attention unless you have reason to believe that *they* would want to interact with you.
It's far more rude to carelessly demand someone else's attention in the first place than it is to ignore such demands. Attention is a precious resource, paying attention to something disrupts what I'm doing, and sacrifices a slice of my life that I can never get back.
If you do email me, be concise: tell me what you want, and why I should want to give it to you. And do so in as few words as possible because every word I read is costing me a moment of my life. Show that you respect my time and attention, or don't expect me to treat you with any greater respect.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
1) Always send your PGP Key early on in the email thread.
2) Always use someone's PGP Key to encrypt an email message.
3) Always digitally sign your emails.
4) Return emails within 3 hours.
5) When requested to setup secure mail for an employee or client, do it!
6) Never use Outlook, it's a pile of crap.
7) Always recommend Open Source tools.
8) Always recommend a secure email provider.
9) Never leave emails in your inbox that can be sorted, labelled and filed.
10) Be rude when it's called for, never protect feelings over common sense.
Following these rules, will leave you successful.
I regularly switch off my email when I have to concentrate. Every few hours I will open my inbox - reply to what can be replied in less than 2 minutes, what I just need to be informed of I glance over and move to saved folder if I will need the information later, and anything which actually needs me to gather information and compose a longer email or hold a meeting etc i flag and move to a to do folder. Everyday I have a block of time to go over my todo folder and get as much done or scheduled as possible.
For short things which are urgent like whats the password to this server I ask people to ping me on IM. Of course I also switch off IM when I am trying to do deep thinking.
For real emergencies people can always call but again I tell them the phone is for emergencies. If they call me too many times for not real emergencies I start responding to their calls with the autotext - In a meeting will call you back.
There are of course exceptions- family calling I will pick. Or if I am waiting for someone to call back with certain information that I am waiting for I will pick.
But you have to protect your time. if your focus is on being responsive then it wont be on being productive. Sure there are jobs where it is more important to be responsive than productive - those are mostly jobs where your role is a coordinator - but if your role needs deep thinking being responsive should not be your priority.
With this system End of most days I have 0 unread emails though I may have many todos. Of course this is for genuine work mails. Spam gets filtered away and I dont even look at it before it gets deleted.
**Life is too short to be serious**
This reminds me of a story of the postal service in Spain. A number of years ago, they got so far behind delivering mail, that they just dumped truckloads of it into the trash and started over. That might have worked for the postal service, but not for the people who were expecting mail.
Yeah, sometimes companies cut too many people. There are cases of dysfunction so bad that even a good manager can't keep up. At that point, it's time to move on.
Of course it is rude. So is sending me an email.
0x or or snor perron?!
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
My Inbox is ALWAYS at zero unread messages. Even a few days after when I return from vacation. I really don't know what is the big deal, you have to find slices of time and prioritize what needs response to what doesn't (example: automatic alert messages does not, since I work managing IT Infrastructure services). My priority is always my Inbox, or Skype pop-ups. Common, people, learn to manage your time. Resume is available under request. :)
Solution: Whitelist.
Don't allow email to come in without registering with you first.
Problem solved.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I'm Release Engineer. I get all my "to dos" through Slack in our company and almost never through email. If you want to get in contact with me, then you go though the channels I frequent. If you think I'm rude because you don't understand how I work? Well, maybe you should talk to me.
That seems odd to me. If someone was upset because I didn't text or IM them before calling, I would imagine my reply would be "If that's the case, then why bother calling?". A phone call is not a meeting- if someone doesn't answer, you use other means to communicate.
Your use of the term elderly implies you're annoying, however.
I often, following a phone conversation, send an email with a short list stating what we discussed and ask the recipient " Verifying that I understood your correctly". This prevents misunderstanding of the conversation, and solidifies the tasks at hand. People can forget items referred to early in a conversation if something more relevant occurs later in the discussion.
This doesn't prevent me from beginning to work the issues, but I have had instances in the past where the client follows up on the email stating there was a misunderstanding, and it prevents us from wasting time on non issues.
Wait, are you saying the appearance of doing work is more important than actually doing work in the US or in other countries?
Also: You're basing your opinions on the movie American Psycho?