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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> If the agenda makes it clear that this can be answered via email, I answer it and decline.

You're one of the good ones.

The retort to "This meeting could have been an E-mail" is "But, do you respond to your E-mail?" Sometimes we really do need an answer/decision/action, and not everyone has good E-mail hygiene. I have worked with a non-trivial number of people who don't read their E-mail and/or don't respond to it. And when you don't respond, I have no idea whether you even read it, so I have to assume you didn't. When I need someone to do/say something, I will reach for E-mail as a first try, but if you don't respond, I have to put on my Disappointed Face and schedule a meeting :(

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>not everyone has good E-mail hygiene

This is so true at my workplace, thinking back. The folks with unreplied emails cluttering their inboxes are exactly who get pulled into meetings. It's basically an emergency handholding step to get them to actually do some work. The folks who clearly reach inbox zero once or twice a day, I honestly barely remember their faces because folks don't dare waste their time with meetings.

I remember hauling someone into a meeting because they wouldn't answer a question over E-mail, and after the question was answered, we went on to another topic where he had to present something by sharing his screen. Looked down at the MacOS dock and his E-mail client had one of those red bubbles that shows how many unread E-mails he had, and it was six digits. 241,995 unread E-mails or some ridiculous shit. Like, dude, do you realize how much of a huge problem you are?

A big reason for people having tons of unread emails is a poor signal-to-noise ratio of incoming email. When there are multiple useless mailing lists, notifications sent in email, emails where all the important information is in the subject line, etc, and a tiny fraction of actually important emails that require a response, it's much easier to lose track of what's going on. It's even easier to lose track if there are other commonly-used communication mechanisms for important things (e.g. Slack or meetings). That's not to say that 200k unread emails is acceptable, it's well worth periodically deleting all the crap, but the "red bubble" notification count is useless if too much of email is noise.

>When there are multiple useless mailing lists, notifications sent in email

Never understood why people don't use filters to move these email into their own folders (or label them) and get them out of the inbox. It's really not that hard.

Sure, it's a bit of pain to set up (initially), but not handling it at all is just a sign you're part of the problem.

I have filters set up. But that's treating the symptom; it requires constant maintenance of the filters because people keep adding more lists, or some manager decides to change the name of the list because they re-branded some internal team name, or whatever. It's just noise. It's work to deal with it. Reducing the noise at the source is better than trying to filter it, and filtering it is better than ignoring the entire system, but the end result when it gets bad is that many users ignore the entire system.

It's a lot like phone calls: 90% of incoming calls I get are spam. I no longer answer calls that aren't in my contacts list, I add businesses I interact with to my contact list if I want to get their calls. Everything else goes to voicemail, and my voicemail is "Due to a high volume of automated calls, all numbers not on my contacts list are voicemail only. Please leave a message." Filtered! But also makes the phone pretty useless for initial immediate interaction.

I think you're overblowing the difficulty of creating filters. It's one of those tasks that pays power-law dividends forever. Sure, I initially sat there for 3 hours making the filter list, and every week or two I have to spend 37 seconds adding a filter, but my inbox has zero emails, and the vast majority that hit my inbox are non-noise things I actually want to read or respond to. It certainly beats the daily sense of defeat a 100,000 unread bubble must instill daily. Inbox zero is luxurious and relaxing lifestyle - a plane of existence a lot of us have reached. Imagine no more stress. Join us. PS - I haven't gotten a spam call or text in ~6 months. There are filters for that too (3-layer Google Voice spam filter + Verizon spam filter + Samsung spam filter = nearly perfect filtering, with no false positives in a decade that I've been aware of)

This is exactly it. In most cases what I've seen is that "this meeting could have been an email" can be almost always be responded to with: "This meeting WAS an email. You didn't respond. Now it's a meeting."

If people aren't responding to emails that are supposedly important, then the incentive structures aren't aligned so that they do respond. I wouldn't say that not having a meeting is an incentive to reply, the incentive is having your opinion heard and considered in future discussions.

Also if there are the occasional emails that actually do need an answer/decision/action Right This Second or whatever and people aren't, then the expectation that people reply isn't being sufficiently set and carried out. Add that to the cornucopia of BS that is management mismanagement.

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