Comment by dsmithatx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsmithatx | Hacker News Reader

I've read this before and I'm sure it was posted here. If I don't check my email 5-10 times daily I have 100+ message every few hours. I work in a company of 90,000 people and I'm a lead devops engineer supporting around 70 developers.

Checking my email hourly during business hours and once after 5pm keeps my inbox tidy and my stress level much lower. Last time I missed two days of work I came back to 800 messages and it tooks weeks to catch up. The stress of seeing 100s of messages is what gets to me. Constantly cleaning up my inbox is the only way to avoid that stress.

Now if I was allowed to develop infrastructure as code all day this would be very distracting. I hope for that Nirvana one day. However, since I do a lot of support and people depend on me I need to constantly react and switch gears.

I'm just a dev but my solution was due to my laziness. I use Outlook/exchange with folders for different areas and then add rules to automatically move them to each area. Dev is for my team with sub folders for areas of the world or team purpose. I do the same thing with QA. Everything else, especially build emails go into other folders.

This lets me glance at outlook and know a decent level of importance for new emails. If something lands in the index, i'll create a new filter most of the time.

Getting included on a bunch of email chains and even getting forwarded emails that I sent out piled up my inbox and I hated it. Took too much effort to go through the crap and keep track. I hate being in meetings and having to watch people go into a single inbox and never find anything.

I work for a software company making software, and I still think 25% of the time is wasted watching people fumble around on computers not knowing what they are doing.

You need to reduce the amount of incoming mail. How do people like you actually get any work done?

Alternatively, if someone gets that much email, it sounds like answering those emails is their primary job, and they should discharge some other responsibilities.

I've found that if I let my email sit for a bit, a lot of issues tend to get resolved without my input. I check my mail first thing in the morning and then usually again in the afternoon. I get an order of magnitude fewer emails than you though.

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