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
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 ;)
- 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
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.
What you should be asking instead is how to write the most effective Email subject, so that the email is actually opened.
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)
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.
http://thecontextofthings.com/2018/06/28/inbox-usually-peopl...
… 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 am a prospective client, I'm not going to contact you again, I'm going with someone else.