It is your responsibility to follow up (2019) | Hacker News Reader

It is your responsibility to follow up (2019)

guzey.com

194 pointsdbrereton225 comments

Perhaps Travis would only have 25k emails if not everyone was expected to send him 4 emails where 1 would have sufficed.

Or to manage his inbox rather than spending time reading self-help and 'art of productivity' thought pieces from 'very important' people / his self-selection of 'influencers'.

No sarcasm is intended here.

I'm reminded of an article entitled 'Wanted: employees who are good at getting things done' https://www.ft.com/content/d77f4d06-4fc0-11e4-908e-00144feab...

The 'getting things done' take-away was, conscientiousness.

I have 30,000 unread emails in Gmail.

I don't see why I need to do anything about it as long as I'm not missing emails. In fact, email management would entail that I do more work (like delete vs archive every message) for the same end result even if it would feel like productivity.

> as long as I'm not missing emails

From the article, it sounds like Travis was missing 75% of emails.

I don't think you can say that, and that's why I don't think it's really an email issue but a more general one about async communication.

I'd liken it to any time you click into a chat/SMS/WhatsApp notification, read it, but don't respond. Maybe you just don't want to deal with it at the moment. Maybe you're busy. Maybe a response takes some thought and you aren't ready.

You didn't miss the message. You just didn't do the extra work of ensuring you'd deal with it. Just think of how few notifications you get that demand that kind of action.

This is how a lot of personal/social stuff goes. But especially for the sort of "cold call" emails in TFA.

Frankly, I don't see inbox-zero vs inbox-30000 much related to this. Just because you have inbox-zero certainly doesn't mean you respond to every email on the spot. Nor does it mean you treat every email with the same priority. Those two things are all you need for emails to slip through.

It's all the same result and it doesn't matter because the point is about the email sender, not the receiver.

When am I able to check my messages, but unable to respond? If I don't have all the facts at my disposal, that's probably what I'll respond, but promptly acknowledging receipt is a core component of sustainable social relationships.

And I can think of one supporting study off the top of my head: Marital interaction and satisfaction: A longitudinal view[0].

0. https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-006X.5...

I like when I can easily answer "has new email arrived since last time I looked" from having an unread count of zero or nonzero. That's why I seldom leave with a nonzero count, but usually cursor through every mail at least to mark it read. I get only about 10-15 mails per day, 95% of which is spam and non-actionable subscription stuff though.

What's the point though? If you never intend to go through the unread messages you could mark them all as read in 3 clicks.

And if it has the same end result, then that's three pointless clicks. Just to change the background color of emails in gmail.

Or you could sort by Unread first and have only items that need to be addressed in view.

Ha… It might take only three clicks but I once did this in gmail (deleting over 50k emails by clicking select all and then delete) and my account was inaccessible for multiple hours. So tread lightly.

Travis was a billionaire and a celebrity. He should have had a small army of personal assistants reading and organizing his inbox. He may personally see very few or even none of those emails, but there should never be six digits unread by anyone.

One way to understand why this article produces so deeply emotional responses, is that it says "it is right and proper to defect in this prisoner's dilemma"[1].

Why is it a prisoner's dilemma?

- Nobody writes follow-ups: everyone has an equal chance of being noticed and only has to write one email (and the recipient gets relatively little mail).

- You write follow-ups, but nobody else does: you get an overproportional chance of being viewed at the expense of everyone writing just one mail. Also you have to put up more work to organise and write the follow-ups, but that is very much worth the extra benefit for you.

- You write one mail, and everybody writes follow-ups: you get an under-proportional chance of being found in the sea of mails, much to your dismay.

- Everybody writes follow-ups (what TFA suggests): everyone has equal chances of being noticed, but everyone has to put up the extra work for the follow-ups (and the recipient gets a factor of three more mails).

My personal opinion on the article is that it is greatly damaging, as it is difficult as hell for society to effectively normalize "cooperate" behavior in such situations, even without voices suggesting "defecting" is your moral responsibility.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

The alternative is to encourage people to not overdo follow-ups. Those with a strong moral compass with understand your words and play fair, others won’t. This will place the former group at a severe disadvantage. The only practical way to level the playing field is what the article suggests.

Edit: now that I come to think of it, another potential solution might be to encourage the people who receive a lot of emails/messages to ignore follow-ups and only recognize the first piece of communication that was sent to them.

i think this is a preposterous over-exaggeration of the situation. it's just people sending emails to each other for goodness sake.

Our society runs on people sending emails to each other, as it happens. What could have higher stakes?

Prisoners dilemma vs cuckoo hashing, under the assumption that people just quickly glance at their email occasionally.

I think the article does a good job of illustrating that, for busy people, there are ALREADY so many defectors that you might as well defect too. When someone has 10,000 people trying to reach them, it is impossible to coordinate a cooperative strategy, and you are failing game theory by trying to play that strategy.

Conversely, the article fails horribly in distinguishing between busy people and everyone else. You shouldn't need to follow-up with your manager, because they should not have 10,000 people trying to reach them. But you should expect the VP or CEO to be a Busy Person because they quite possibly do.

---

Phrasing it as "your responsibility" is also foolish: you should do it because it is the game theoretical winning move AND because this is just how Busy Person culture works. Trying to argue that Busy People should change their culture is a lost cause, because they're responding to very real incentives. You have to adapt to them.

But it's still the Busy Person's fault if they didn't set up priority channels and thus missed out on something genuinely important.

It's a very shaky premise. Using that same logic I can derive: "If you want to meet with me, it's your responsibility to set up your mailbox filters"

In fact if one cares about the said mailbox, there would never be any significant number of unread emails in the mailbox.

This article is just a lame attempt to excuse self-centered people who couldn't be bothered

>In fact if one cares about the said mailbox, there would never be any significant number of unread emails in the mailbox.

I don't care about the mailbox and suck at managing it, but I do care about the people who reach out (if you give me a call or follow up I will always apologize and get you what you need). Usually I manage to get to everything, but when I'm swamped or when my mental health is not doing so well things start descending into chaos pretty fast.

Recently it's been bad enough that I am considering just hiring a part-time secretary to organize things, reply to the trivial stuff and keep me in check so others don't have to.

I'm not sure this follows. I have easily millions of emails per year controlled with excessive filtering to get through my day in a very organized way, and I still end up with messages that I just skip over if the apparent need/involvement from me isn't clear quickly.

Time is very precious and especially in situations where someone wants something from you without any specific requirement for you to act, it's just common sense that these get deprioritized or ignored.

> In fact if one cares about the said mailbox, there would never be any significant number of unread emails in the mailbox.

I looked away from my laptop for about 15 minutes just a bit ago to take a fresh air break and came back with 80 emails that evaded filters ;) I'm not complaining "oh woe is me I am to be pitied", I'm just saying that not all inboxes and positions have the same email habits and patterns for filtering. Some critical things did sneak by because the senders have a different communication style than I planned for and the usual triggers I rely on failed. We're from different teams so none of us are responsible towards the other in any fashion, but there were critical issues to be addressed.

People are very creatively complex, and when you hit a high mail volume, there just isn't enough waking time in the day to get every single item. Despite mailing lists/distribution lists, far far too many people are shy to write these for fear of looking stupid and prefer the "human" approach of 1 on 1 conversations. I don't blame such persons, and at the same time I don't feel bad that I'll absolutely deprioritize a 1 on 1 that could easily be delegated to my team, but the sender decided not to use the distribution list as we require.

Absolutely I'm selfishly protecting my time; I'll gladly help people, but if it's not my specific job requirement or obligation to do so, then my help comes on my terms. Any other way and I'll likely be drinking to an early grave ;)

Are you a VC or founder? That’s wild

Any tips for writing an effective email to people with your level of email volume?

Sure, practice conciseness.

- For your familiar team, during any verbal communication, take time to restate your position and why brevity may be in your email. Remind that text doesn't always convey tone well, even more so when writing quickly first to establish that it's never personal (and make sure it's never personal)

- Practice figuring out exactly what you want someone to take away from your email and figure out how to effectively reduce your content. Don't bother with automated tools on this, they're all awful and just introduce more confusion -- you need to practice this and see what works with different types of communicators.

- Size up who you're writing to; if they're verbose, likely they think verbosely and you'll need to pick out the elements you need to expand on. For more concise speakers, use specific terminology (they will figure it out)

- Use white-space heavily to draw attention to important topics. Save highlighting/bolding for only the items that are absolutely essential they're understood (e.g., "Don't do this you'll break everything", "we must absolutely not do this because of X." and expand on X a bit more) A simple line break makes it easier to read

- Judge your audience and write an appropriate response -- e.g., Sales doesn't need to know why a bug is taking so long or why you aren't fixing it; you can take the time to explain, but ultimately either:

a) what you write will just be copy/pasted to a client who also won't understand it

b) your contact will muddy your idea anyways when trying to rephrase it

Focus instead on what needs to be understood and save the details for those who need it

- End longer emails with an enumerated list of action points; if they take anything away from your email, make it that, and people will typically respond in kind to keep emails fast and short

- Drop the corporate signature -- no one cares or likes the sigs with dozens of images about certs/awards no one has ever heard of and it clutters communication

- Don't be afraid to outright ask for a TLDR -- don't be rude, just say something like "I'm having trouble following this; can you provide a more concise summary that clarifies these points for me: (bullet list of things you need to know to take action)

- Identify in advance stuff you can automatically delegate to your trusted team and make a distribution list for this. Require people go through the list. You can speak much more concisely to those who know you because they understand what needs to be done, so once it lands, just fwd it to your team @'ing the relevant person with brief instructions

- Reports are for start of day/end of day; filter out the important ones and be very judicious here. Reports should serve you, not the other way around. If you're spending more than an hour with reports, likely you have too many or you need to revisit the purpose of the report

- Random emailers get deprioritized always. If you cannot figure out what it is you want in a few seconds of reading, ignore it or if you sense there is some actual importance, a quick email asking for the polite TLDR

- (Technical items only): unless it's a specific issue you're working on currently/frequently, practice filtering out and just mentally categorizing "we have issue with X" so that if you deal with X later, you know just to check this at that time. Such items are good to have a note on, but you don't need the specifics until it comes up.

- Don't let randoms use chat with you -- they must go through the filters and email no matter how important it seems to them

- Prioritize your team and make sure they understand they have your attention -- even a quick "I've seen this, I need time to respond though. Meetings till HH:MM" is enough (remember to stress to your team brevity is never ignoring)

- Corollary to the above, let your team know how to get your attention for important stuff, and then respect those methods. This is important to keep the flow of communication good

- Turn off the automated responses from Outlook/Gmail, most of the time they're useless and miss the context entirely, and will just end up with more email

- For stuff you do need to write out frequently (instructions on accessing something, process, etc), start documenting it carefully and send links with a quick polite note like "hey! We actually have this documented here in full. Give it a read and let me know if you have questions"

- Autohotkey can be used for other such items that need to be done repeatedly

- Take control of the Subject line once you own an email and make the email fit your filters. Very few people will care, and it only makes your life easier

- Practice typing. I used to play a lot of online games so got used to fast typing, but there are lots of typing games that are fun (Typing of the Dead is not only funny as heck, but it's pretty good, I unironically recommend it)

- Practice objectivity and removing accusatory statements and inflammatory ones. "You did this, here's why it's wrong" feels personal and you get defensive emails as a response. "Looks like X is the current state, we need to get to Y, here's the path I propose" does the same thing (teaches them the right way, corrects the state), but avoids the backlash

I could go on as I have a LOT of thoughts on this, but ultimately it comes down to figure out what you actually want to say, avoid personal attacks, delegate when possible, document items you frequently repeat, make the conversation fit your filters

Follow up as I realize I did overlook your actual question :D I wrote how I answer, not how you can get my attention, but many of the points apply.

Conciseness, clarity, and directness.

What do you need from me, why do you need it, what actions are desired now, why is it important enough to write me directly?

I realize this may sound bad from me, but I usually take the default that people don't need to write me, they just know who I am and write me anyways. They get delegated, and my team lets me know what I need to focus on or there are specific items in my mind that I know I need to focus on.

So either be important enough to be in the inner circle, or make your points very clear on why _my direct involvement is needed_. If you can't define it, likely it's just not really needed, and it will be delegated out.

But clarity of writing and conciseness is best.

heh, you sure have a lot of time to write long HN comments for someone who gets 320 emails/hour. Feels like you need an assistant or two with that throughput.

End of my day and 100+ wpm ;) Gotta decompress somehow.

Appreciate your taking time to reply!

Effective email writing doesn't help in these sort of cases, because the email is never even opened.

What you should be asking instead is how to write the most effective Email subject, so that the email is actually opened.

This also. Avoid keywords, avoid "URGENT"/"PRIORITY"/crap like that, and pick a solid good thesis statement

Don't try to categorize my time and attention, that's for me to decide, and you're just wasting characters in your title.

Vague statements don't make me curious, they make me bored at best and frustrated at worst because it breaks my filters and it's hard to find. ("Maybe you can help on this" style titles are the worst as I have thousands of messages like this. I'll never find your conversation among them even if I want to)

The right balance is probably something like 20% uniqueness 80% action needed. (these are bullshit numbers, just guessing) Unique item we're dealing with, action request of the email, line above the fold on email preview should state the relevancy for me right away (usually you get about 15 words for most email clients)

Where I work the "URGENT"/"PRIORITY" emails have been abused to the point the words have lost all meaning. Every time I see it I just skip right over it. There is probably a 1% chance it's something I actually care about and in that case someone else always brings it up in a meeting.

What's worse is when people do this to your calendar. We have teams that send out a meeting invite to hundreds of people every time they do a deployment, and block off several hours or days. I don't care about their deployment at all, nor does it have any impact on my schedule. In these cases I'm forced to take an action (declining the meeting) or else my calendar is just a mess.

This. I've reached a point where I ignore most of my e-mail. Not even bothering organising it.

http://thecontextofthings.com/2018/06/28/inbox-usually-peopl...

Taking even these 80 emails in 15 minutes that evaded filters, if that’s a consistent rate, that’s 2.8 million per year.

… how does one person get within even a couple of orders of magnitude of this?

If these are even vaguely real emails, surely dealing with this is a full time job for at least a dozen people. (And even that would give less than 30 seconds per email: 12 [people] × 37 hours/week × 48 weeks ÷ (80 emails / 15 minutes × 1 year) ≈ 27 seconds per email.)

I just can’t grasp the scale or where it would be applicable.

Yes, there is a lot of automation that comes through also and stuff that gets routed, and a lot gets sorted. I'm not sure what else to say besides I have many facets to my work.

I can't give a guess on how many are "real" emails, but I have a ton to pay attention or to get to the right team/person and to keep running track on.

Keep in mind that this is not unique conversations, just raw email counts. I couldn't begin to guess how to figure out how many are unique threads as subjects always change, threads merge, etc.

Thread A might involve me on the first message, get delegated by the 2nd, and then it's just there for the subsequent 30 messages. If it's relevant for me and my team, we have a tag for update posts and it gets a special highlight so I can TLDR and catch up on dozens of emails in a few short bullet points

Thread B might be a long running project where I need to know the history, but there's no involvement until later on, and once tagged, then I start to enforce sorting mechanisms that help me.

There are plenty of tricks for effectively sorting this stuff and indexing it in your mind/note planner for fast reference. The subset of emails that get my full attention for every single word is very small and it's an extremely protected space.

Seriously, we are in 2022. If it is important, someone will call you or reach you by instant messaging anyway.

I don't understand people setting up gazillion of email alerts/warning per day. If you reached that point you don't rely on notifications anyway so it is better relying on a synthetic dashboard showing you what is ok and what needs attention.

It's about auditing. records for N years and demonstrable proof of tracking and reporting.

Green = fine, red = investigate and report.

Notifications are not good for archival or reporting purposes and are heavily abused by devs anyways for useless crap. Notification assumes you're watching non-stop.

Email can get filtered, parsed on easily, and have longevity with a lot of solutions.

Combined with the source database for the emails, you have two sources to meet regulations.

And DMs from people are annoying. Chat apps do stupid things and give users too many features to be annoying and not effective with communication. Crap like teams makes it worse as it increases the ways you can spam people.by integrating with calls and calendars.

A simple email and sql database is pretty fine, makes monitoring easy, and archiving even easier.

> And DMs from people are annoying.

Annoying people will be annoying whatever the medias but at least on instant messaging platforms you have only one thread per person, that you can actually choose to mute/ignore.

And you can put yourself offline whenever you want.

This depends on who is in need of the other person more.

I've had people forget to call me back when I have work for them. One example, lawyers, but I've seen it from other professions. I did not even have a chance to set up an appointment, so for all they know it could have been a million dollar contract.

I am a prospective client, I'm not going to contact you again, I'm going with someone else.

Take the ego, judgment, and “how things should be” out of it. This is about how to effectively get results as the sender. And it works.

We all have this choice of principle versus effectiveness. If you would like to go with the strategy of thinking the receiver is self-centered, and you should have to only send one email, then good luck. In today’s world you will not have as effective a reply conversion rate as someone else who sends three emails.

I know this is controversial, so everyone is free to attempt the first strategy.

From a practical point of view, absolutely. Excellent advice.

But it hurts to see behind the curtain, and see that this tactic is necessary because of the excuses given by several very important people. It makes it very obvious for us that the power imbalance is terrible, and that they are able to get away with behavior that they wouldn’t tolerate from others.

Exactly. A serious person with an overabundance of legit email gets an assistant or delegates better or whatever. If you're proud of your 100,000 message inbox, you're likely a disorganized poser. Not that there are any of those in the VC-startup ecosystem....

This feels like a tragedy of the commons. The person being emailed has a finite amount of attention. Sending additional emails will only prioritize your topic for their attention until everyone does this trick, at which point the advantage of multiple emails will converge back to zero.

That is until the inflation forces a shift to another medium of higher value. It goes like this at my work: email -> Slack -> Meeting invite > Text Message(!) -> phone call (!!). If it gets to a phone call it better be the CEO stuck in a well and I’m the only person limber enough to pull him out, otherwise I’m just going to be mad.

Still a tragedy of the commons situation. Slack, text messages, and phone calls are more synchronous media that demand more attention from the recipient - attention which you usually have no right to ask for - and escalation of everyone using email to Slack/meeting invite/text/phone call is worse off for everyone.

Agreed. I wish I knew what the solution was. I used to be very anxious about following up on everything. But burn out has made me more resigned to the fact that it’s just impossible

I haven't found a way of fixing this problem individually - I believe that the only solution is systemic/cultural, where the work culture has to change to one where initiators of communication are more restrained and receivers are more diligent about following up.

I believe that the fact that senders are trigger-happy and receivers aren't great at reading suggests that the root problem behind both symptoms is that both groups don't value the time of others very well, which would explain both sides of the problem - although I'm open to alternative explanations.

One issue is there’s no active signal of current load on your communications partner.

If I’m visibly on the phone or you get a busy signal, you know I’m tied up. If you fire off an email, you can’t know if yours is one of two or one of two-thousand emails I have to process.

If I’m overloaded, there are emails that I won’t get to, pretty nearly by the definition of overloaded. If I’m overloaded and you have no signal of that, it’s not likely to go well for our communications, but doesn’t (necessarily) mean that I devalue your time.

> One issue is there’s no active signal of current load on your communications partner.

How about something like this: for every 25 unread emails in the recipient’s inbox, the sender needs to hold down the ‘Send’ button for an additional second

To send me a gmail right now, you'd have to hold send for a little over 3 minutes. To send me a work email right now, you'd have to hold it for almost 20 minutes. Works for me! :)

(Of course, you can't know the actual destination mailbox [nor its contents] at the time of sending the email [forwarders, mailing lists, not wanting to leak information, etc]).

Well, sounds like a pretty effective back-off multiplier to me :) With recipient-configurable values of course.

Maybe the problem with email is that is it such an old installation, in lack of a better word. I feel like there’s a better - almost similar - format waiting right around the corner.

In particular, sending has to incur some sort of ‘cost’ in terms of time or effort. This [0] needs to be doubly conservative.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

The most important productivity tool I have is ignoring people.

90% of messages/requests I don't need to explicitly action (probably 80% of slack messages are followed an hour later by "oh I figured out the answer").

The 10% will follow up.

Why does this happen?

I just don't understand it.

Human nature; if you have a problem there is a linear scale of effort:

1. Do I just know the answer 2. Can I trivially find the answer in under 10s 3. Who will know the answer? 4. What research will it take to learn the answer

Agreed about this situation. However, the "tragedy of the commons" itself is actually kind a myth, and agricultural/grazing commons worked quite nicely for ages in many parts of the world.

Interesting, I had always thought the term came from the actual example of Boston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Common, and the depletion of resources in Rapa Nui is another prime example of a failure case. In any case, we have useful concepts that come literally from myths, e.g. "Faustian bargain", maybe this concept will eventually go that way?

You can't compare the past to today when cities in the past were merely thousands of people and the people were working with primitive technology.

That's why people get Executive Assistants once they reach a certain level where the demand on their attention becomes larger than they themselves can possibly handle.

There's a cost to each additional message, so this is Capitalism, not a Tragedy of the Commons: whoever is willing to spend the most, gets the best.

Not sure about that. The additional messages can be automated, especially by those who send tons of emails (salespeople and recruiters, for example)

I'd suspect that automated messages are very hard to do in a way that doesn't get you blocked - you're being judged on both quantity and quality. At least, in the context of trying to get a celebrities attention.

> Now, if he didn’t reply to you after having 4 chances to do so, that’s a pretty good indication that he doesn’t want to talk to you. But before that - it’s just you being stupid and thinking too much of yourself.

Or, you should learn to use email instead of thinking too much of yourself. Unless you are CEO of a Fortune 500 you have no excuse to have 100K unread emails

Hm, not quite. Email at my company is also used as a catch-all notification bucket. That’s what the filters are for.

I dunno. I have learned that I truly have no sense for the amount of e-mail some people get.

When I started working at a big company, I felt like a big kid because I was getting 20ish emails a day, many of them automated.

Then I learned that my relative who runs a non-profit can get 1,000 emails from actual human beings in a single day. Her normal day is composing at least 250 individual, non-templates responses.

And now scale that up to one of the biggest/hottest startups in the country at the time.

I’m gonna say that’s kind of an excuse.

A 10 hour workday is 600 minutes. (Who works an 8 hour workday anymore? So 2019.)

To write 250 individual non response template emails every day. It means she sits down at her desk at 8am, writes an email every 2.4 minutes for 10 hours straight, and then stops working at 6pm.

Seems unlikely.

I disagree. I have the same same mailbox I’ve had for 20 years and have lots of unread emails.

I have to prioritize time and use the time that I would spend on 100k unread emails to better purposes. I think there’s probably zero important unread but tons of unimportant stuff.

I think people have very individualized email coping mechanisms and I work on not assuming that my method works for everyone or thinking that someone has “no excuse.”

If you are gainfully employed and produce good work and are professional to me, I don’t judge your email.

I read this advice as more from a perspective of the person who emails someone inbox-unorganized.

So if person A is unorganized with their emails and I need or want something from them I'd better followup (for my own sake, to get the message across no matter the org skills of person A).

I think it's a bit cultural though. My grandmother would say that if someone didn't reply to her, call her back, etc. then it is "pushy" to ping them again and it's good manners not to. I'm Polish, she was Polish. I think the level of acceptable "pushyness" raised between her and my generation and I'd be OK being more aggressive.

To me, this perspective seems to be indicative of thinking too much of yourself. What business is it of yours how another person manages their inbox? You have no right to their attention.

If you sent a personal friend 2 twitter DMs, then 2 emails, and then 3 text messages and they don't reply, I don't think they are a friend. My inbox gets pounded as well but if a personal friend emails I skip all the other emails and reply to that one first.

Yeah my friends know how to reach me, doesn't matter how busy my work email is. I'd be really surprised if the CEO of Uber didn't have a way for his actual friends to reach him that was unrelated to his 100,000 new email work inbox.

Absolutely agreed. I think the parent article is decent advice for cold e-mails, but for personal interactions not responding is a good way to lose friends over time.

Does anyone else have trouble paying attention to email at all nowadays? Particularly in workplaces that use Slack or other chat software.

I only have the focusing capacity to use one communication medium. I spend tons of mental energy making sure I reply to Slack threads and DM's, but at the end of all of it, my email inbox is sitting with thousands of unreads.

The article says "if it's important, they'll follow up [again over email]", but in my mind at this point, it's more like "if it's important, they'll hit me up on slack."

I think more generally, I hate having multiple communications systems. If we (at the workplace) generally move to Slack for communications, stop emailing me. I won't see it.

I do the contrary, i never even open slack, but i keep a 0 mail inbox. Slack is de facto, a way more annoying version of the email.

I go days without opening my inbox. When people send me emails I assume it’s like, FYI type stuff that I’ll find… someday?

Depends on the company, I think. Current company barely uses email, but my old company was primarily email for anything important (mainly sharing deliverables and external communication)

I'm the opposite, my email is where the important stuff is. If you Slack me, GChat me, or contact me in any IM that doesn't have threads that I can mark back as "unread" if I'm busy or on the go... At best it's important enough that I send myself an email about it, to handle asynchronously. At worst I will never get back to you.

Cool to see my quote in there...

Since I wrote that post, I took a VP role at a startup and am now living on the other side of this. I'm constantly getting emails from people wanting to sell to / partner with / work with / work for Pinecone. I try to reply within 48 hours but the reality is that these emails are competing with those of my team, the CEO, other departments in the company, big partners, big customers, candidates I'm trying to hire, contractors that are blocked on me... And all those compete with time for deep work, family, and recharging.

I actually appreciate a few follow-ups for important or urgent things. And I do sometimes interpret a lack of follow-ups to mean the matter isn't all that important anyway.

Whether I “follow up” depends on the purpose of the communication. If I’m asking to borrow money from someone then that clearly benefits me more than him so I will follow up if necessary. If I’m asking my friend to come to my party then no I won’t follow up. If his misses the party because he couldn’t be bothered to read all of his emails then that’s his loss, no skin off my nose.

Isn't this encouraging spamming MORE communication because the inbox or whatever channel is full?

Now what?

I half suspect the just "hello" messages are a form of this whole game, rather than write a whole long block of text that might be ignored, they think they have to spam someone so they just fire off a hello... and maybe another ... https://nohello.net/en/

Great job guys...

Depends on the context but I really don't want to have to follow up with everyone. It happens in some cases so I will, but as a rule having to repeatedly follow up means I stop caring. If someone is so busy I always have to follow up I'm not wasting my time just to hope to get their attention ... maybe.

Huh, I think you just described bufferbloat.

Sending four emails to someone who doesn't even open the emails is not going to help.

The author should've advised people trying to reach Travis to ambush him somewhere, or get the attention of someone he interacts regularly and ask them to act as an intermediary.

Idealism: You don't manage your inbox! Shame on you! I deserve to be angry with you! I shall now grow a long and angry beard of indignation

Pragmatism: Fuck it I'm gonna jam some more emails up your ass

It works the opposite for me:

If someone constantly sends me emails and follow-ups my brain automatically flags them as unsolicited spam and usually I reply with the word "unsubscribe" (even if they were a real person).

I'm just a random dude, and I don't want to imagine it for people who remotely have some attention.

In a world with 8 billion people, we should simply accept that not everyone has the luxury of reaching another random person from those 8 billion people.

> I live by the rule that if it’s important, the sender will follow up.

This is a silly rule. Maybe the sender will reach out to a competitor.

This is one option, and I'm sure it works for some people, but I prefer to overdeliver for the trusted contacts that I actually have then get introductions slowly over time to more important people. Not my only tactic, but by far the best one. I don't really care about status or wealth, but I've had calls with multiple billionaires and world renowned subject area experts. None of these were from cold calling or cold emailing.

Honestly, I've found cold contacting to be such a slog that it demoralizes me more than the meagre amount of work it brings in. Sometimes the front door works and its the only option for some circumstance or another, but if you have enough time and enough of a buffer there's always a better way. Even something as simple as finding, say, the person's philanthropic foundation and showing up to a $500 fundraising dinner is far, far more effective.

But for some, the sales grind works just fine and they like the fact that they can set up funnels and process around it. I prefer a more fortuitous, organic life. I find it more fulfilling and authentic.

> I live by the rule that if it’s important, the sender will follow up.

And I live by the rule that narcissistic assholes who don't value my time don't deserve that second email.

You can at least acknowledge the email to say you'll reply later, saving everyone grief (not to mention another 4 followup emails cramming up your inbox even further, if Alex Guzey is to be believed).

This is classic bottleneck theory btw. Address the bottleneck in your workflow, not pre/post bottleneck problems.

It's not just common decency, it's actually the most efficient way to deal with your email backlog.

This is entirely unrealistic and totally detached from reality. Someone like Travis Kalanick simply cannot reply to everyone who emails him. He literally wouldn't have enough time to do that if he just replied to emails 24/7/365, along with the work associated with replying to those emails, which is often way more than the time to write a response.

The truth is, most people don't value your time because you don't deserve their time. I don't mean this in a judgmental way. It's a cold hard fact of reality. If I emailed Mark Cuban, the President of the United States, or Jeff Bezos and they didn't respond to me, that doesn't logically make them narcissistic assholes (they may or may not be, I don't know, but whether they are or aren't is entirely independent of their responsiveness to my cold outreach email). The fact that they didn't respond to my email doesn't make them assholes and it doesn't make me any less of a human being. There's no need to get emotional or moralistic about this.

Your suggestion to acknowledge the email is even worse, because they'd be dishonest by saying that they'd get back to you later. As I pointed out earlier, they literally do not have the time to respond to every email if they spent every minute of their lives doing so.

When it comes to trying to get in touch with someone whose attention is valuable, it's best to put your ego aside.

Context is important here. The article starts by mentioning Travis Kalanick, but the quote itself appears in the context of it being presented as a general rule for handling email queues, and a good idea at that:

> The moral here is the following: whenever you send an email to somebody (especially to somebody busy), imagine that this is what their inbox looks like. Unless you send a follow up, you’re not even trying. And they know it, so unless you follow up, they will probably just ignore you, correctly believing that you do not even want to talk to them so much. As Jennifer Doleac notes: I live by the rule that if it’s important, the sender will follow up.

In that context, where the expectation is that you should reply (and you're not Jeff Bezos), then acting like this is simply being an asshole. You are explicitly saying "my time is more valuable than yours so I expect you to waste more of yours repeatedly until I decide to deign you with a response."

Note I'm not even disputing the main point of the article, that it's your responsibility as the sender to follow up. That's actually good advice. But if you as the receiver, are systematically ignoring email because you expect people to email repeatedly until you feel like answering? That's not "efficient email practices". That's just being a dick on a power trip.

In the context that you are emailing Jeff Bezos, of course, then naturally I agree with you: one sucks it up and accepts that realistically Jeff probably gets a million of these a day, probably going straight to spam, and chances are you're not gonna get a response and shouldn't take it personally.

It seems to me that the article is mostly talking about outreach to someone that you're trying to get in touch with, who has little or no official obligation to get back to you (barring the example w/the busy friend). If that's the case, and I'm the person asking for their time because they're providing value to me, then I think it makes complete sense that the onus is on me to try to get their attention. They are not assholes for ignoring someone that they have no obligation to respond to.

This applies if the masses' perception of your importance is as inflated as your own. It fails in contexts where the person messaging you can just move on without your input. ie., I'm making a decision and I'm informing you as a likely-interested party. I'm not going to force you to be included if you're not actively including yourself, and if the decision doesn't have the outcome you desired, that's on you.

And this doesn't work for my inbox. If you're cold-emailing multiple times, your emails are already going to spambox, and each is just earning you another negative ding. This goes for all tech recruiters and anyone who succeeds at guessing my work email using context clues from LinkedIn. I don't owe you my attention any more than I owe it to any other stranger on the street.

Email will go the way of ticketing systems and have a status for each message so you (or the system) can keep following up with a delightful series of canned messages.

"Just circling back"

"Any ETA on this?"

"Checking in to see were we're up to"

The other end can then color the messages depending on what reminder number you're on.

Email is fundamentally different from ticketing systems in that the primary goal is communication, though email often serves as an ephemeral database also. With ticketing systems it’s the reverse, communication is incidental instead.

Addendum: It’s actually better, in my experience, to treat ticketing systems like communication tools instead of issue tracking databases. In fact one of the more common sources of contention is engineers coming from a documenting/databasing point of view, and other system users approaching it more like a web forum.

Most responses comes from the 2nd or 3rd email. For any external (not at my current company) outreach I expect to have to follow up 3 times at least to get a response.

Tech recruiters seem to have some kind of god-awful candidate management software that sends follow ups automatically now. It's always the worst recruiters.

The irony sometimes is that automating the best practice can make it so ubiquitous that it loses effectiveness. Bunch of tools for this. gem.com is a big one (it's also a data broker feast which is how they get your email in the first place)

> automating the best practice can make it so ubiquitous that it loses effectiveness

I believe that this is just tragedy of the commons.

fuck this - if you send me even one unsolicited follow up I'm setting up a filter to report all of your messages as spam

if you text me once/day until you get a reply, I'm getting a restraining order

have some respect

On the flip side, I get about ~2.3k emails a day.

If I've not responded to your first email - I could have passed over it. If I haven't responded to your second and third emails, I'm not interested and continuing to contact me is just spam.

I use filters and tags to categorize my email so its very unlikely that I'd ever miss an email I wanted to read. The person in the article seems like they have some kind of executive disfunction when it comes to dealing with communications - which is entirely understandable, many people do. But it's on them to find the methodology to cope with that, not on other people to keep re-sending reminders to read a message they've already sent.

This is really bad take especially the part about him wanting to meet his friend when he is town.

With a close “friend”, I’m going to text him once or twice to his personal phone, then call him. If he doesn’t answer my text or phone calls, I’m calling his wife to see if everything is okay. Because after us being friends for 30 years, I know some of his people. I can at least reach out to them on FB messenger.

If it is someone I don’t know that well, I’m playing 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon until I can reach them through my network if it’s business related.

What? This is greylisting on mental level. If I say "hi" to you and you ignore me, I won't repeat it. It's your responsibility to get your "things" together..

If you "follow up" like that, you are, in fact, a rude piece of shit.

Maybe you just don't get to have a conversation with just anybody you feel like talking to.

I wonder if a secretary would reduce the friction.

First, let's agree that we almost all do this. As soon as we have a bit of power, we allow ourselves to forget replying. You really need this plumber right now? The plumber suddenly ignores you. They know they can let you work for it, you are the one in need. A new bug report comes in and you are the only one that can fix it? They better get going sending those follow up emails already.

When I was a wee programmer in search of a job, I would beg to be considered and would reply to any email in mere minutes. Now that the tables have turned, I can just wait for recruiters to follow up few times until I grace them with an answer. The ones that do not follow up? No need to reply.

At work I got some high ranked title? The juniors better be honing theirs ping skills.

My point is, as soon as we have a bit of power, it is easy to drop the ball. Because you can simply ignore the issue as you don't need the resolution as much as the person asking.

Anytime you want or need something, you must be ready to spend time asking over and over again. What a colossal waste of time for all humans.

And so I wonder, is this what a secretary solves by being paid to be conscientious for you?

> I wonder if a secretary would reduce the friction.

Yes, also because any secretary worth his/her salt has a hidden unique power: forwarding emails to the correct people who can handle them.

> I wonder if a secretary would reduce the friction.

Every CEO I worked with that had a PA did a much better job of handling email, reviewing documents and meetings. Not that they were necessarily better CEOs ... but at least they didn't miss/ignore important emails and came to meetings prepared.

> You really need this plumber right now? The plumber suddenly ignores you. They know they can let you work for it, you are the one in need.

Plumbers have an even better way of dealing with this. If you really, absolutely need them right now, they provide an emergency service - but you have to pay $250 extra. Turns out that $250 cost filters out most people who decide their dripping tap doesn't actually need following up after all. Plumbers often have a secretary / screener handle their incoming calls.

Maybe instead of repeated "follow up" emails, actually hiring someone and paying the consulting fee for their time is more likely to get through. Time is valuable, and most of these "follow up" emails are from people who do not respect or value your time. It's even part of default spam scripts: "Following Up On My Email From Last Week" is the subject line of a Chinese quadcopter spam email that went direct to my spam folder today.

Simple rule of thumb: Only follow up with people you've been in touch previously.

My strategy is simple: I just walk to the person's desk, have a chat and kindly ask if he can help me. Health point : I walk. Social point: you get to understand the person better and feel if he/she's under pressure.

It doesn't scale. But I work only with people I need to meet.

Customer is different. I'll pick the phone more often than not.

Yeah, meeting people is more stressful than sending emails. But in the end, it gets better.

Yeah, just pester them. Show up at their doorstep while you're at it.

It's the responsibility of the party with more to gain to follow up/ensure they see the emails. Anything else is just sugar coating the power dynamic.

But telling people they are expected to follow up is important for people who think that they aren't supposed to. I think it's universal that anyone who would have questions about following up should.

A lot of facets of this power balance have been mentioned.

Here's a new one (I think):

Imagine busy CEO B that doesn't care about your time, that you need to pester with emails to get his attention.

Now imagine thinking-along CEO T that tries to have a well organized inbox, possibly assisted by a secretary, so that when you send him an email you receive an auto-response telling you when and if you should get a response and how you should interpret a no-response; this may include letting people know that too complicated or unclear messages will go unresponded. (Richard Stallmann had this approach when I mailed him years ago, before his scandal, where I'd get a response with an average waiting time in hours, pretty neat. Using NLP probably anyone could filter his/her mail quite efficiently these days.)

Who would you want to have as a boss?

Yes, it's a power balance. But all parties should wield their power responsibly.

It sounds like you are saying Stallman is supposed to be the more desirable boss. Is that really what you meant? If so, then I would pick a different public figure for your example. I have first hand experience with this, and, lol.

I bet if I cc Travis boss on the email I get a response. :) . I always have a backup plan for emails not getting read, and typically state it in the email. Things like, "if I don't hear back I'll assume you want me to make this a ticket and assign it to you". Then it's out of my hands.

Yeah.. I'm definitely in the camp of "follow up more than once and I instantly mark you as spam". If its an urgent message you are sending me then fine, whatever (although you should have alternate means of contacting me as well). If you are just "hustling" then no, absolutely do not badger me in any communication channel.

Its like a telemarketer saying "just keep leaving voicemails until they call you back", or a door-to-door person saying "you have to knock for several minutes to be sure they heard you". No way! One follow up, no exceptions. Work on your pitch instead of spamming the void.

The most "follow-up" emails I get are from spammy sales people I already hit "Report Spam" on their previous emails.

Guess I'm not important enough to be chased until exhaustion, held down, and have my face screamed into.

If you respond only to people who follow up, you're filtering for more dedicated senders. On the other hand, even if you're a very busy person who gets a ton of email, dedication is a very rough proxy for importance.

No, you're filtering for assholes.

If not receiving a response is strong evidence that they're not interested then yes, but with how the majority of people use email it isn't. A lot of people just miss a large fraction of incoming email.

This approach to filtering does give you a higher level of jerks, but not overwhelmingly so.

It also gives you a lower level of non-jerks. Basically if you do not act like a jerk, you will get ignored.

Norms that actively punish being reasonable and considerate are bad norms, and people who promote norms like that should feel bad.

Gross. If the problem is email overload, everyone sending you 2-4 emails instead of one is actually making the problem worse, right?

But yeah, in contemporary society it's hard to get in touch with people, unclear what the etiquette is, and it may take multiple attempts. Is just a fact, sure. I'm not sure about "responsibility".

If OP is actually about how to be effective making sales emails (recruiters included), then I have no experience to have an opinion on that, but I would unfortunately believe that when doing sales communications, the venn diagram of effectiveness and annoyingness may have a lot of overlap.

"If you want to connect to famous and busy people, you should keep trying N number of times".

"I am too important and you should pester me until I reply because did I mention I am important?"

Yeah, very profound insights, lol.

Unfortunately, email is not a business process. I'll leave it at that. I may be on my own little island over here in the middle of the sea of internets - but, going to hold that opinion till I die.

It's your responsibility to follow up in the sense that if you need them and they don't need you, then it's on you.

But if you're reaching out to them about one of their responsibilities in the organization, then it's on them.

"He dropped the ball" is a perfect reason for my not having accomplished a goal. Nagging might help, but it does not address the problem.

On the other hand, "avoid regression to the weakest" is something to avoid. Not sure how to avoid that without "managing" people.

Agree with the premise, and it can be more effective to choose a different medium for your follow-up communication. Someone not responding to email? Try sending an IM or giving them a phone call.

To be clear, I don’t mean when you’re cold-emailing someone for an intro or a favor you don’t need. I mean when you have a dependency at work and can’t move forward without information from someone else.

This post crops up enough and annoys me enough that I wrote a full response to it: https://floverfelt.org/posts/it-is-your-responsibility-to-re...

It's pretty sad that we've reached the point of spamming close friends just to get their attention, though I understand exactly what he's talking about. I just don't think it translates at all to a knowledge work setting.

If you have to spam me to get my attention, you probably aren't actually a friend of mine, just an acquaintance that I continue to tolerate because you haven't done anything egregious enough to deserve being told to fuck off and die. Spamming me will erode my tolerance very quickly.

There is really only one person to whom I have a responsibility to respond, and we've been married twenty years. Everybody else can damn well wait -- possibly until the first Tuesday after Ragnarok.

So when do inboxes evolve into having a second layer that only filters emails with follow ups as real ones, and everyone sending emails has an AI that follows up x3 or more lol

But what happens once everyone is sending 4+ follow up emails?

100k unread mails, of which 75k are "hey have you got my previous emails" ?

If someone doesnt answer me after the first email, too bad for him - i will go somewhere else.

> so unless you follow up, they will probably just ignore you, correctly believing that you do not even want to talk to them so much

This is just bs. They are not "correctly believing", they are just assuming my time is worth less than theirs. Unless they are my direct boss, I won't be "following up" at all. I will just say I am blocked on action so-and-so by person so-and-so who is not responding.

If I were your direct report and you said you were blocked on action so-and-so by person so-and-so who is not responding I would accept that for a brief period and then ask what you have done to follow up with the person including the use of alternative communication channels. If the answer was nothing the following conversation would not be a comfortable one.

I had a team lead like that once. I ran away screaming ASAP at the first opportunity. How is that fair that I can reply within minutes to every email/slack/phone call, but multiple persons within the company don't ever reply and it's my fault???

Them not replying to an email is not your fault. What I would consider someone's responsibility is to follow up and try alternative communications to just sending an email. If that doesn't work then escalate it on your own accord to your team lead. What I would consider not acceptable is sending one email and just blocking any attempts at forward action because you didn't get a response. Quite honestly that type of behavior would make me happy to see you run away screaming.

I understand your position. However from my position it just creates more work for me and balancing between spamming people and being always ready to answer to the teamlead "What happened to X?" and the answer "It's at Joe's" is not acceptable. Anyway, to me it wasn't a healthy environment.

Hello. Amazon here. I see you bought some diapers but didn't reply when I asked if you wanted more diapers. Perhaps you missed my inquiry...

I literally don't read (work) email unless personally asked to or unless I expect an important email. I haven't missed anything.

You should:

1. Create an email subfolder hierarchy. 2. Automate a categorization of messages to said folders

Now you have a much more managable set of email backlogs. Spend some time getting to "0 unread" in all important categories (and in "uncategorized") - and then you can live like a king _keeping_ those subfolders at 0 unread.

This kind of thinking is why I'm always on 10-20 different drip campaigns from random strangers on the internet.

Or otherwise said, "it is your responsibility to be more obnoxious than others, maybe then you get noticed". However being obnoxious is not really a good first impression, so maybe you will be ignored anyway...

Squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Oh. That might explain why I've started receiving lots of follow up spam e-mails that are obviously sent by automated Crams and often doesn't even get my name or the company's correctly.

I'm thinking too much of myself if I assume that you will read an email I send to you and follow up with me at some point if it's appropriate? I guess that reveals what is thought of me...

Anyone who tries to follow-up more than twice comes off as desperate or an automated spambot. I don't appreciate that hustle.

2 follow-ups should be the absolute limit (preferably, a single follow up).

On a lot of subjects, sending cold email AT ALL is pushing the envelope. It might be convenient for you to communicate with somebody, but that doesn't mean it's acceptable for you to waste their time.

Unless you have a specific reason to believe that there's been some error in the way your email was handled, or unless you have some positive right to a claim on the person's attention, following up IN ANY WAY is beyond the pale.

Yeah, unless you have some kind of prior relationship with the person, it seems extremely weird and annoying to send follow-ups when they haven't answered. Unless you work in PR and that's your job or something.

I disagree. On contrary, if you do follow-ups, the recipient may think you're too pushy and entitled. I'd never dare send follow-up in my university.

This reminds me of people who spend an inordinate amount of time talking about and reminding everyone of how busy they are.

Hey look, it's the very same bro culture that caused Travis Kalanick to have to step down from Uber in the first place!

Maybe it's true, but acting like it should be true, and insulting the people reading the article for apparently not knowing it's true is toxic masculinity.

Is the author an early Uber employee? That would make a ton of sense, and if not he would have fit right in.

A major problem is you still can't mark an email as read from GMail android notification.

I think I am the only person in my office who religiously keeps their unread message count to 0.

I get anxious when my unread message count is not at 0.

No and furthermore, fuck you

it is, but never forget who is bad at email

they don’t value you

no one misses emails from high status people

the lion, the witch, and the audacity of this ...

It is _your_ responsibility to configure your mail filters and use your tools to organize your workflow in such a way that you do not miss important emails. Your failure to do so is your own failure. If you fail to see my email because you have a laughably amateaurish gmail-based workflow consisting of a single 100k-message inbox, then please, kindly fuck off. You're not worth my time. The notion that a message "must not be important because they only sent one" is absolutely hilarious!

If I don't reply to your message, it's because I feel there is no need to reply or because I'm ignoring you. Sending multiple such "did you get my email?" followups will land you in the kill file.

protip: I whitelist signed and / or encrypted emails and they go to the top of the queue. Spammers never PGP. Marketers and slimy recruiters can't be bothered to look up a public key. Easy way to get my attention.

I think the problem is that what is important to the sender is not necessarily important to the receiver. I am not Travis of Uber, but I do have expertise in a domain such that I frequently get people reaching out to me to solicit advise or answers to a question.

It is very important to the person asking the question that they get an answer. It is less important to me that they get an answer, and so if I'm busy at the moment those emails won't get a response. I do wish more people followed up though, because I do wish to help; the more they follow up without getting angry or hurt, the more likely they are to reach me at a time when I am able to help.

That principle certainly applies to spam. The messages there are "I want to sell you something," and "I am not particularly interested in buying that thing."

This is an important distinction I think.

I generally coach people who email regularly to explain the why behind a question or the value to them of me answering.

If your consistently failing an audit because I am ignoring you then you you can have an answer.

Oh, FFS, if you want to help, then stick unimportant mail in a "maybe when I get around to it" queue. Don't ask/train people to be obnoxious.

There are two different types of "receives a lot of email". The first type makes up the bulk of the people who receive a lot of email, and that's the type where almost all of the email isn't actionable. Newsletters, receipts, spam, etc. Anything sent in bulk.

The second type is people who receive a lot of correspondence – people expecting a response, or otherwise need action.

The people who claim that it is the receiver's responsibility to process all of their email almost exclusively fall in to the first type, because nobody who falls in to the second type can reasonably process it all.

You misunderstand. I don't think it's your responsiblity to "process all of your email". You're free to ignore any cold email.

I do think it's your responsibility not to encourage people to spam everybody else, even if getting repeated requests so you can "help people when you're not busy" tickles your ego. If you don't want to help them with whatever it is you do, let them go somewhere else.

You are also making yourself busier, which kind of makes a person question your sanity if you really are busy already. Even ignoring a message is an effort.

"because nobody who falls in to the second type can reasonably process it all"

Then hire a secretary to manage the inflow of data sent to this person, or maybe change the org structure so that the individual needs less direct correspondence. Frankly people are trying to fix systemic not-enough-time-single-point-of-failure org structures with process Band-Aids that only lower the net productivity of everyone involved.

I’m just a guy who built a thing that people want to use and have questions about, not an org to fix. I think many people who “suffer” from lots of requests are the same. I wish I could charge enough for my help to justify a personal secretary!

well then you just can't process all the emails. It does not matter if people send follow ups, you are just changing the portion that do gey responces.

Then you put them all in a "someday" folder and work FIFO through that. Offer a way to pay for direct solicitation. Those who pay get preferential attention, otherwise you get to it when you get to it.

Yes. Email is generally best-effort response and people need to be understanding. It's not even always the best tool for the job.

UNLESS dealing with email is your primary job responsibility. Then I would fully expect you to have your act together.

Telling people they should follow up just makes the problem worse and creates more email to process.

Surely something like a contact form could put any correspondence in some kind of queue that a person could just get to as they have time, instead of just using email directly. Or having an email account just for correspondence with the public so it isn't mixed with other types of email. Then just time block some time to reply to people each week.

> then stick unimportant mail in a "maybe when I get around to it" queue. Don't ask/train people to be obnoxious

Do enough people not have conversation threading that this is an issue? One unread message takes up no more room in my inbox than three unread messages in one conversation.

Email filters don’t work if the senders don’t respect convention, don’t use context-appropriate content, etc. I consider my work email to be spam, basically.

There’s a principle in Civics that you should be careful passing ridiculous laws/policies because contempt for one law can quickly become contempt for Law in general.

Most companies have ridiculous email policies, and then managers wonder why their reports are missing their messages. Last week I found out someone important quit or was fired six weeks ago. I asked for someone to forward me the message, and it had the most innocuous title ever.

Around here if you need to talk to someone you take it to chat, which makes it very hard to record (previously outlook had such a small retention setting that you had to take it to chat it wiki anyway). Conversations happen in email, but they’re slow and often not fruitful.

> It is _your_ responsibility to configure your mail filters

It may very well be, but if you _have to_ reach someone who did not, following up sounds like a good advice to me.

Right, and you should almost certainly go alternative routes instead of repeatedly emailing in that case.

> it is _your_ responsibility to configure your mail filters and use your tools to organize your workflow in such a way that you do not miss important emails

Email is a tool. Different people use it differently. No need to get moralistic about it. I’m not going to make my inbox the centre of my life or even work day. It’s presumptuous to assume everyone else must adopt a workflow that works for you.

Different people work different ways. But if email is a part of your work, then part of your job is handling your email in a reasonable fashion. Asking other people to work around your broken workflow (send it N times because I can't keep track) is unprofessional.

Email isn't about you. It's about you communicating with other people. If your way of handling email hinders that, then your way of handling email is broken.

Now, if other people are seeking free, unsolicited help from you, then yes, expecting you to have your email set up to work for their email is... unreasonable.

Dunno, this thread really puts words in people's mouths.

TFA is about the fact that emails fall through the cracks and that following up is a good idea.

This can even happen to work emails, but I don't think any of the examples in the blog post are work related.

Whether the receiver has a catastrophic organization failure or whether it's a one-off accident doesn't seem relevant to me beyond couching some lectures in these threads to hypothetical people: in either case it is a better assumption to go "I should follow up" vs "there must be a reason they never got back to me, so I won't."

This is good advice beyond email. Dating is another place this comes up. It serves you better to politely follow up than to assume someone is avoiding you the second it may seem like it.

Meanwhile, "Oh, she got distracted and never responded?! Pfft, well she should get more organized if she wants to talk to me!" is kind of the vibes I get from this thread. While that's fine, to be clear, you may also be missing out if that is your default mode.

Back when professional communication consisted of memos and letters on paper, it was reasonable to expect a recipient to read most or all of them (even then, departmental/company-wide memos sometimes fell through the cracks) because it was much harder to physically produce and send an overwhelming volume to any one person and there was a real financial cost to doing it.

Email is fundamentally broken in the volume of messaging it allows at no costs. All inbox schemes, filters, auto-categories, etc. are just band-aids on the fundamental problem.

Charge the sender something close to a first-class postage stamp for each email sent, and you'll see email get productively useful.

email something blockchain something

You're applying an inconsistent standard here.

> No need to get moralistic about it. [...] It’s presumptuous to assume everyone else must adopt a workflow that works for you.

The premise of this discussion is a post titled "It is your responsibility to follow up".

You're completely missing the power dynamic the article is talking about.

You don't send a track to a record label's A&R and then dismissively say "they're not worth my time" when they don't respond. You don't contact VCs asking for a coffee meeting to pitch your startup idea and say "your inbox management sucks, not worth my time" if they don't get back to you in three days.

This is about getting the attention of someone who is very busy and would likely doing you a favor (or buying something from you, or investing in you).

Agreed - I think a lot of responses in this thread get it exactly right.

The assumption from the OP is that they are in position of power (however defined), and that "it's no skin off their back" if somebody's request is missed. They have the luxury to adopt a (to others seemingly) random and specific uncommunicated threshold, and enforce it.

That is true, in a very specific subset of cases and situations.

That is empathically not true, in a very large set of cases and situations.

If you are the one sending the email, then typically you are the one that wants/needs something, ergo you are typically the one that is responsible to get it done / follow-up. That's a generalization but a useful one.

(In particular, the notion of "if you follow up several times, you're going into kill file" is again only applicable for a very specific set of situations. Your boss, client, spouse, friend, partner, lover, lawyer, parole officer, tax auditor, teacher, et cetera would probably not react kindly to enforcement of such rule).

It's not a power thing.

Disagree, or at least we are misunderstanding each other.

I am not saying you are gleefully abusing power or going ona power trip. I am saying there's implicit power in your suggestion / preference.

If you work for a large company, you don't get to put your boss in a kill file because they emailed you a few follow ups. There's any number of situations where that's an unthinkable option.

Consciously or not, you are assuming position of power over the sender. That you don't need them and you aren't negatively impacted by enforcing arbitrary and draconian thresholds. As I said in my examples, most of us likely would not be that non chalant in situations where we do not have the power.

Boss would have to have really stepped way over the line to cross the "ignore" threshold. If I were not in a position to do anything about it I'd ideally be looking for another job before reaching that point.

If you're someone's boss then my expectations of your ability to conduct yourself professionally in everyday email correspondence is higher not lower.

There do exist certain technologies and practices that do in effect impose draconian power over the sender. What I do is not one of them, and if I were to become aware of anything I do to inadvertently impose on others then I would take extraordinary steps to avoid it.

... in other words, it's about hounding somebody who evidently does not want to do you a favor in the hope that you'll get them to do it anyway.

The whole inbox management question is a distraction. You can't guess what's going on with somebody's inbox management.

You can make a pretty good guess that if they don't answer you, they either don't want to talk to you (in which case you should leave them alone), or they have some kind of weird power complex and get off on you begging (in which case you should run far away and find ANY OTHER WAY to get what you need from SOMEBODY ELSE).

> You can make a pretty good guess that if they don't answer you, they either don't want to talk to you (in which case you should leave them alone), or they have some kind of weird power complex and get off on you begging (in which case you should run far away and find ANY OTHER WAY to get what you need from SOMEBODY ELSE).

... or, as the article says, they're just busy and/or have poor inbox management. It even has real examples of repeated follow-up emails working.

The power dynamic is important. A substantial part of my job is getting answers or actions out of busy people who are above me on the totem pole. When the recipient is more important than you, it doesn't matter if they have poor inbox management. It's on you to communicate in whatever way gets your desired result. That may mean following up with multiple E-mails. It may mean chats. It may mean a phone call or face to face conversation. You have to adapt to the recipient.

If I send a busy manager an E-mail asking for information or for approval to do something or whatever, and they don't respond, it could be any of:

1. They have poor inbox management and missed it

2. They go through their E-mail infrequently

3. They don't care as much as I do, or have no incentive to respond

4. They don't want to do what I'm asking for

5. They don't like me and actively don't want to help

The reason doesn't matter. In all cases, I didn't do my job (get whatever it is I need), and so it is still my responsibility to follow up and either hound more, change my communication style, address whatever problem prevents them from engaging, or whatever it takes. If I fail to get an answer, the consequences are not on them, they're on me.

Choose the simplest explanation of someone not responding to your email:

1. they don't want to talk to you 2. they have a weird power complex and want you to beg 3. they missed the email or forgot to follow up

2 makes way too many assumptions, we can eliminate it. I'm confused you made a point about not guessing someones inbox management, but then guess at their deep psychological state.

1 and 3 are pretty equal if you assume people are organized on average, otherwise 3 has the edge if you believe the average person is disorganized.

The problem with 1 is you trade maybe not bothering someone for lots of opportunity cost for you.

I'd also argue many software engineers default to 1 because of the anxiety of potential conflict and/or imposter syndrome.

That's an interesting approach.

When I did my first startup, I landed my first seven figure deal because I'd done the research to know someone needed my product. But they were too busy to respond.

I regularly followed up over six months by both email and phone. I knew they needed it. But I also know that people tend to prioritize their days by what fires are burning and need to be put out.

Eventually I bothered them enough that they realized they should do something to get me to go away. I guess I became the fire they needed to put out. Only then did they actually process anything I'd sent enough to realize it was something their Fortune 500 client actually did need, and that they'd look great by proposing it.

They wound up being my biggest client and helped make my startup profitable.

I could have said: Mr. Potential Client, I'll send you one email. If you don't configure your mail filters and organize your workflow properly, well, "fuck off."

If I did, I wouldn't have likely gotten any of my clients. Then I could explain the outcomes to my investors: "Well, I sent them an email. They failed to read it!"

The point is that if you want to persuade other people to see things your way, your approach doesn't survive first contact with reality. That's OK: your job may not be that, and it probably works just fine if you only deal with incoming requests. There's just going to be a limit to what you can do.

sounds like survivor bias

Sounds like common sense.

Not even that.

This anecdote is a simple cost-benefit play. Playing the lottery makes sense with certain odds.

again we are confusing the. concepts of responcibility and best practice.

it's best practise to vet the builder to make sure i get someone who does his job properly. its best practice fpr a war correspondent to wear body armor, and to avoid dodgy beighbourhoods on the way home

but its tjr builders responsevility to do his job properly and not to defraud you, a reporter is not at fault for getting shot and it's not my responsebility not to get mugged

The applicability of your metaphor to the conversation at hand may not be as clear to others as it is to you.

This is more about situations where one person would benefit from the relationship and the other person couldn’t care less. You think Travis Kalanick cares if someone pitching him says “he’s not worth my time?” But that person benefits a lot from his response.

I agree but also touch some grass.

Email pollution is a real thing. Any meaningful conversation between 4 people has cc going at least 1 if not 2 levels up. Apply that at scale and I have seen Directors with hundreds of conversation threads each day. There is a duty for them to be in-the-loop as in notified, but if you place an action item for them in an email and expect them to respond to your pressing concern of the day without some out of band followup to to flag that particular email, then protip: don't tick it off your highly optimized workflow when you hit send.

This is why intra-org comms should go through something like Zulip.

It is easy for others to follow asynchronously and posts tend to get automatically categorized by senders if people responsible for channels yell at people to categorize properly in the first couple weeks until it becomes a second nature for everybody.

Old topics just die and dive deep in the menu, waiting to be resurrected by automatic suggestions when someone tries to invent a name for a topic.

Everyone sees where the need to catch up and they can easily dismiss channels where they follow just a single topic or so.

Then that person needs to coach offenders, and senders need to be explicit/clear when something is an action item vs an FYI. If that Director is truly needing to be in the loop and take action on so much email that they cant keep up then there needs to be a person hired to manage that.

> Sending multiple such "did you get my email?" followups will land you in the kill file.

Since you have distinct rules about communicating with you, and believe in organizing your workflow, I assume you have something that autofires when someone first reaches out to you explaining the rules? Or do you expect them to live up to your communication standards that are not in alignment with the industry standards?

> protip: I whitelist signed

Real protip: Protips are supposed to be generally applicable. Unless you're Mark Cuban or PG or similar, "protip, here's how best to get in touch with me" is just misusing the phrase.

> Or do you expect them to live up to your communication standards that are not in alignment with the industry standards?

The parent IS talking about standards by saying:

i. If you miss an email because you don't manage your inbox, then it's not my job to follow-up.

ii. If I don't respond to an email, then don't expect a response.

Of course, there are exceptions [to the standards] if you need to follow-up with your CEO or if your mom calls.

Yes. Email on the internet is still best-effort delivery after all. If someone suspects an email somehow didn't get delivered that's a whole different situation.

Whether or not a response is expected depends on whether the respondee made their expectation clear, if it isn't implicitly clear given context. Otherwise response is at the discretion of the responder.

Like duh right? I'm remarking for the benefit of those that haven't yet had much exposure to discourse particularly among computing professionals on the internet. Expect for people to vary in their expectations, but this attitude of entitlement, expecting others to "earn" their attention is completely back-to-front. That burns people every time, and they're usually oblivious to it happening.

I'm speaking specifically to and from the perspective of what I expect to be the majority of HN readership - those deeply involved with matters concerning the technology space. So no, what I said isn't applicable to the wider readership of this blogger, that would be mere "best practice". But I think most readers here don't need to be clued in about what constitutes protip-ness.

I was actually clueing you in on a protip, as most people I know don't encrypt emails and I wonder what percentage of mail you receive went through PGP. I advise people to follow up with me, and would rather they sent three mails instead of one.

My point is you seem to think most people are like you, but I don't think even in the tech space that that is true. If you were (maybe you are, I don't know) important enough putting out your "rules to contact me" is sufficient. Otherwise, it's judging people harshly for following what we have decided is a best practice.

Sure I have no qualms about disregarding common practice in certain domains, but it doesn't matter. I don't invent rules that impose unreasonable expectations on others. My expectations are extremely minimal, in contrast with the rest of the planet, evidently.

I didn't say that a sizable percentage of people do that, nor do I expect it. (I do get a sizable percentage of PGP and S/MIME messages, for reasons that don't matter, and I would not expect that to be a norm outside certain contexts). People are reading too deeply into that.

> I have no qualms about disregarding common practice in certain domains

That's not relevant. You said you judged by (and blocking!) other people for following common practices when dealing with you. How are they supposed to know you are one of the minority who doesn't expect a follow up?

I think auto sending an email explaining that you don't like follow ups to people who reach out for the first time would be a good practice on your part

You forgot to mention your best filter for not getting a flooded inbox: being a hostile person.

Ha, perfect. That person is so angry and entitled to say f-off if you don't do what I say.

I think people don't read replies. :/

If you refuse to interact with anyone who hasn't managed to build good email habits you're going to miss out on interacting with a lot of interesting people.

Good for you. Enjoy not being able to contact busy people like Travis Kalanick.

I don't want to contact him, personally, but your argument is delusional and unadaptive.

> It is _your_ responsibility to configure your mail filters and use your tools to organize your workflow in such a way that you do not miss important emails. Your failure to do so is your own failure. If you fail to see my email because you have a laughably amateaurish gmail-based workflow consisting of a single 100k-message inbox, then please, kindly fuck off. You're not worth my time. The notion that a message "must not be important because they only sent one" is absolutely hilarious!

I do this and still miss emails. Checking my email is mixed in with other activities and inputs in my daily life:

- Coding

- Scheduled meetings

- Unscheduled meetings

- Organizing the team

- Providing support for customers

- Responding to chat messages

- Responding to emails

I've had people try to moralize my inbox, the way you did here, and when I tried to think of ways to make it better I realized the only way for me to do that is to subtract from other activities. Personally, I think your take is fairly selfish, but mainly because you moralized it - and to the degree with which you did, not because you're advocating filters.

Personally, I'd suggest taking a step back and thinking about that communication is the result of a system of incentives. You can't moralize/pressure people into adhering to your preferred communication. It's about finding somewhere that someone can be reached and being persistent enough to reach them.

Lol, someone has never seen WAY too many emails despite having good filters.

Had the same reaction and don't forget to add phone calls + whatsapp messages + probably whole days of back to back scheduled meetings.

I am not saying phone calls/whatsapp messages from friends but business related.

There is no magic productivity tool that helps with that.

Whoever has less power has the responsibility. If the IRS sends you a notice about an audit or something (just as an example), and you miss that because of an unorganized inbox, that's on you. If an entrepreneur emails you for capital and you don't respond, that's on them to follow up.

If the "IRS" is sending you an email, you're probably being scammed. The real IRS sends letters, via traditional post.

In fact, the IRS seems to be anti-technology IMO. IRS.gov has the dumbest password policy I have ever encountered. In your password, you must use subset of 8 special characters, but only once, and it can't be at the beginning or the end of the password. Of course they won't explain that requirement, they will just happily tell you that your password is not valid until you give up. (hopefully this is no longer the case)

Was just an example. But point still stands with snail mail which many people (myself included) don't go through all that carefully.

That's a very hostile attitude. Other people will have opposite ways to find important email, "important people" to you might not know about your special way to be connected. Your way is not the only way.

Wait, the OP is clearly describing a case where the sender is much lower on a power dynamic and trying to meet a much higher person, like a CEO of a unicorn.

The CEO of a unicorn absolutely has no responsibility to configure her mailbox so that randos can ask for advice in a way that grabs her attention. She does have the responsibility to configure her inbox so she doesn't miss board emails though!

This is entirely unrealistic and totally detached from reality. Someone like Travis Kalanick simply cannot reply to everyone who emails him. He literally wouldn't have enough time to do that if he just replied to emails 24/7/365, along with the work associated with replying to those emails, which is often way more than the time to write a response.

The truth is, most people don't value your time because you don't deserve their time. I don't mean this in a moralistic or judgmental way. It's just reality--they don't know you. If I emailed Mark Cuban, the President of the United States, or Jeff Bezos and they didn't respond to me, that doesn't make them conceited jerks who "aren't worth my time" and it doesn't make me any less of a human being. There's no need to get emotional or moralistic about this.

When it comes to trying to get in touch with someone whose attention is valuable, it's best to put your ego aside.

If you're talking about someone who in theory "should" respond to you (a coworker that you have a dependency on, for example), what you said makes more sense. But the conclusion of "they're not worth my time" because they missed your email or forgot to respond to it is ludicrous. Imagine your colleague emailed you, and because you're a busy person, you didn't respond (I'm sure that's happened at least once in your life). Then later they told you to "kindly fuck off" as they passed you in the hallway. How ridiculous would that be?

Yeah. This:

send him an email

send him a follow up a few days later

then send another follow up like a week later

and then one more follow up just for good measure

Now means that guy has fucking 4x+ of every fucking email! Wow!

This is a foolish waste of time.

Interesting...

I think this is not only wrong, but harmful advice.

Speaking louder or more frequently does not cause attention. The opposite is true. Speaking less, and softer, causes your interlocutor to focus on what you're saying. He has to try harder to hear, and thus values it more.

> Speaking louder or more frequently does not cause attention. The opposite is true. Speaking less, and softer, causes your interlocutor to focus on what you're saying. He has to try harder to hear, and thus values it more.

This presupposes attention given in the form if reading your email which isn't a given for the email disorganized.

Actually there are tons of techniques that one can use if they are willing to abandon integrity. As a matter of fact I've consistently seen bootlickers and shady tacticians advance really fast in their careers and lives.

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