Your inbox is a bandit problem
parentheticallyspeaking.org
parentheticallyspeaking.org
It's not that the volume of messages needing a reply is so large (though sometimes that's an issue too) but rather the time and energy required is so large. Most things don't allow for a quick one-liner off the top of your head and then going back to work. In some cases, you have to do research and make sure stuff is followed up.
My situation is by no means unique. Be thankful if you don't have to deal with it, because a lot of us do, and it's not by choice.
But the problem has nothing to do with email. The problem is with combining what sounds like a full time management job with a full time teaching job. In fact email makes it possible to batch those requests instead of always being interrupted at an external schedule.
And sorry -- I am not trying to tell you how to live your life, what comes next is just an engineering observation. But if one is overloaded the solution is almost always to ... reduce load. Transfer some duties and/or delegate more tasks and/or hire someone to help, etc. This is usually not easy, but IME most folks under overload who say they cannot reduce it either (1) did not try to reduce it in earnest or (2) are micromanagers who are willing to delegate only partway while maintaining the role in final decisions. My 2c.
If the institution wants more work done that there is time for in a normal working day then they simply have to hire more people like any normal company would do. If the institution cannot afford to hire more people then it simply has to admit that there are limits to what it can commit to doing.
This is what unions are for.
And that’s even beside the point as email in not to blame. They would still be voluntarily overloaded in the era of snail mail with letters stacking up on their table.
Agreed, hiring in academia is both painful and tricky. But someone running a grad program for the department and who is as overloaded as the author with other duties is well placed to advocate for a secretary or a grad assistant to lighten his non-core duties.
> And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors and omissions with serious consequences.
More than for a bus driver, nurse, cook, physical therapist, etc., etc., etc.? The world is full of people who volunteer and self-assign tasks to their breaking point; then burn themselves out. They feel that they can do X best, so they convince themselves that they must. With very few exceptions, this is BS and a non-productive path to burnout. Don't be like that.
Our job is to teach well enough, to research well enough, and to handle administrative stuff well enough, in a context where any one of those could easily be a full time job and it's impossible to do all of them perfectly.
Having a work pattern in which the less important stuff falls through the cracks while making sure the important stuff gets handled is necessary and common. As long as people understand your pattern and can work within it it's generally ok.
The professor is the master in their field. They go into class. They lecture on things based on their experience, answer questions, then leave. Students are there to make use of the faculty and the department to achieve their goals. If someone wanted to invent YouTube, they would go to university to study under someone who had invented some complex video compression & streaming algorithm etc. This is where universities output the outstanding individuals.
But in the 21st century, many universities are simply teaching institutions. They make sure the student understands and guide the poor ones. They make mediocre engineers, but dams and highways are built and maintained by mediocre engineers. The government unis were funded per head; literally the goal is to fill the lecture hall with as many heads as possible.
So I don't entirely disagree. In the end, my mom was not promoted to the level everyone expected of her, probably due to things like this. I do believe she actually replied to the important or thoughtful emails and just built this image of inaccessibility to seem fair to everyone.
As for reducing: research, grad programs, journals, media inquiries - these are not optional for profs
You are accustomed to professional managerial class luxuries that are unavailable to most hard working folks
Some of whom might have good options for changing jobs, or good hopes of things improving in the near future, but for many it would be the lesser evil compared to trying to find a different job with the same positives (whether salary or other motivation) but without those negatives.
For a tenured professor (and someone who runs the department's grad program and teaches many classes almost certainly has a tenure) all of those are optional. During my PhD I have seen all sorts of arrangements, including tenured profs who taught minimum load and did nothing else. No grad students, no special courses, no seminars, nada. I am not advocating this. It is, in my book, not a good approach unless you spending all other time to solve Riemannian Hypothesis or something like this. But tenure gives a prof a lot of leeway on how much to work and what to work on. My 2c.
When I said that a particular job task is not optional I mean that not doing this task will lead to a disciplinary action from the employer (being fired, put on a performance improvement clock with the HR, etc.). Reducing those tasks brings in one set of considerations.
Your definition of "obliged", if I understand it correctly, is primarily a self-assigned or a community-expected one: "if I stop running this seminar or remove myself from that editorial board, I will feel I am not doing all I can / my colleagues will look at me askance". But it will not trigger retaliation from the employer. Reducing overload from those tasks brings a completely different set of considerations.
Weird how much this can differ. I have those things and sometimes go months without looking at my email. 99.99% of messages I care about are in one of two messaging apps, or some app or another reads what matters from email for me so I don’t actually read the email myself (mostly shipping updates).
When I retired, it took me several years to refine my email use. I finally figured out Google inbox with Primary, Update, etc. tabs were my friend. I had to give up the habit of treating each email with intent. Maybe 1% require a thoughtful response, 10% are worth reading and the rest can be ignored. That was not true for work email, though.
These words are so funny and so sad at the same time.
Sorry for going off on a tangent, but seeing them used together unironically always has a fingernails-on-chalkboard effect on me.
I know you didn't invent them, it's probably what that role really is called where you work. I've worked there, too, in places that have a "customer success" team.
It doesn't have to be universal, but at least in my experience, in places that use these names, customers aren't successful, at least not by conscious design and effort, and their "success manager" ain't no manager, either.
It's one of these icky corporate euphemisms that make everything around them a little sadder. But it's also a bit fun, because of the immense silliness.
Alright, off-topic rant over.
Support are a separate group, they answer emails to support@, open tickets to investigate, etc. They do communicate with your CSM to tip them off if you’re having a hard time.
“An unrecognized device signed into…”
“Upcoming birthdays on your team” (not making this up - Lattice sent this today)
Even slack sends me email spam to tell me about messages that are waiting for me in slack. LOL.
It's always nice when people reach out but it can also kinda tend to pile up and become a source of feelings of guilt about stuff you didn't reply to (and all of the sudden it's 16 months later and replying this late feels awkward).
REALLY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS regarding my daughters' exams and schooling etc are in Telegram as well, sometimes WhatsApp. Some schools are well aware of the problem and have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an app that isn't even an app, so now we have to head into yet another app-site to pick up the kids and get updates on schooling.
The good thing about Discord at least is I can be sure to ignore 100% of it and opt in any time I like.
The thing about emails is if I get too much spam from someone, I can unsubscribe. Same with social media. But I can't just block the gullible spammer uncle.
Our local school seems to switch apps every year, steadily getting worse with each update until this year when they switched to something that's the least-bad of the lot.
Every time, I start thinking to myself: maybe I can just fucking write an app for them to use that wouldn't be a usability nightmare. But then I come to my senses, and realize that I absolutely don't want to maintain an app for a single customer, set up email, sms, etc., store data safely in compliance with the various regulations. So I just go back to grumbling.
I wish HN allowed me to drop images, but basically, there's this "NEW SCHOOL TRANSITION" channel for my daughter who's switching schools.
95% of the channel is just user join spam. Yesterday someone dropped several PDFs. The title of these files is something like OZ36824106181121.pdf
Wtf is this file? I open it and it's a list of textbooks to buy. The school shop is open 29 Dec - 5 Jan, except in weekends. But some groups are to buy these books after 20 Jan. Am I in that group?
There is no CTA - do I need to buy this and when? We have a textbook borrowing scheme. Does the new school not do textbook borrowing?
This is not my only child. This is how DBTC gets me.
You cant search properly, you cant flag or filter, the desktop apps are just slow and shitty, basically the whole thing is not optimized for productivity at all.
That sounds like personal email more than the work email discussed in the article. And if that's truly the split of your work email, seems like all you need is some server side inbox filters to manage that.
For the last decade my work email has been basically notifications, with sometimes a single or two emails thoughtfully written by a human. And that's probably because anything people expect me to read will be either in Slack/whatever chat app, in a ticket/task, or straight in a calendar invite with an agenda to get up to speed.
Funny thing is emails are now either only relevant for a few miliseconds where I only need to know what triggered it, or ultra important "we'll delete your account in 5 days" type that I absolutely don't want to miss. In a year I haven't got anything in between.
< FOR ME >
Together with filters, freely reporting as spam/unsubscribing, my Inbox <20 becomes a sort of todo list which I can review and handle whenever needed (this include flight/hotel bookings, getting back to complex emails, etc.).
- Some emails required a one line immediate response. I did that.
- Some emails required a longer reply. I tagged them (in Thunderbird) as ToDo and archived them.
- Some emails had information I would need at a later meeting. Tagged as TempInfo and archived.
- Most emails were read once and archived.
Now, inbox is zeroed. Next, can attack items in ToDo one by one, and untag them, so the ToDo list is always short. Similarly, as soon as the relevant meeting finished, untag TempInfo emails.
Now, I work somewhere where Slack is used, resulting in an endless deluge of messages that cannot be controlled.
Pretty good, especially with sending delayed messages.
- Information consumes attention (as has been long observed).
- Corollary: excess information demands fast, cheap, regret-free rejection mechanisms. TFA describes several such approaches. The "DBTC" folder is one, but specifically refusing to use other, unmanageable, message queues (Twitter, FB, Slack, etc.) would be others. If a tool refuses to respect your boundaries, reject that tool.
- Time-blocking for low-urgency, but still significant tasks is useful. You're shifting from interrupt-driven mode to scheduled flow. This also means you can assess how your schedule relates to the incoming message flow, and whether or not that flow still exceeds your (now far more readily quantifiable) time devoted to it.
- There's still the question of how to prioritise items you're responding to. I'd suggest a rough triage method of:
1. Identifying high-priority senders (immediate family, work (management, colleagues, business relations), friends/social, and pretty much all else.
2. Randomly selecting from lower-priority queues is a way of fairly distributing your attention. If you can't do everything, sample a handful of items.
3. Quick "no"s (and learning how to phrase these delicately, if necessary) are useful. In some cases you might point the correspondent in a more useful direction. There's the physics professor's tactic of dealing with crackpot questions by directing them to one another, which preserves both attention and sanity....
My first exposure to the correspondence-limits problem came in one of the SF author Arthur C. Clarke's essay collections published in the 1970s or 1980s, in which he wrote of having had to resort to the tactic of responding to most of his own voluminous postal mail correspondence (and that international postal mail, for the most part, as he lived in Sri Lanka whilst most of his correspondents were elsewhere) with a pre-printed post-card with a set of checkboxes which answered most common inquiries. He'd already considered two further options: "Mr. Clarke regrets", and silence.
The future was not evenly distributed.
GTD asks you to figure out now the action for each thing, think about how long that will take, figure out if it will take more than 2 (or N) minutes, and if ≤ that, do it now. The "do it now"s can add up to a lot of time and distraction. DBTC is the sorting step but without the "figure out the action" step or (most critically) the "do it now" step. And there's no reflection step, either.
So it's not "literally reinvented", not even "almost".
Adding to what I wrote earlier, another advantage of postal mail is that it comes at fixed intervals, typically once a day (historically possibly more often especially in cities with "morning" and "afternoon" mail, making one-day responses possible, currently with curtailments in service possibly only a few days a week). This automatically batches mail processing.
Early in the corporate adoption of email a firm I worked at only polled periodically for new external email (every 20--30 minutes or so). Whilst internal email was pretty instant, this meant that at most external emails would give cause for interruption only a few times an hour, rather than at any given moment. I've given thought to reimplementing this on my own systems from time to time, perhaps even only 2--3 times a day, say, "morning email" (limited to priority recipients), and afternoon email (the Great Unwashed Masses have their opportunity).
In reality, I've adopted Inbox Black Hole, in which I rarely if ever check personal email. Circumstances make this reasonably viable, though those are decidedly atypical and most professionals would be unable to adopt a similar tactic.
> If this message is not urgent, and if dealing with it now will distract me, and if it’s either not long, or if it’s personal, it goes straight into the folder.
How do you know if it’s urgent, or if dealing with it will distract you, if you don’t know what the action is?
Anyway, I didn’t mean it as a criticism; that sort of thing happens to me all the time so I thought I recognized the phenomenon.
I have inbox zero for personal and work emails. I can’t imagine living any other way.
I don’t have notifications enabled. I triage the inbox 1-3 times a day, outside of checking for an expected email. Triage means responding then archiving, deleting, or snoozing. It’s pretty easy so I’m always baffled by people who have thousands of emails in their inbox. I get the feeling they just don’t take action or don’t receive any real communication.
Because it's easiER to have thousands of emails in your inbox.
Half-jokes aside, it's not as easy for everyone. I can speak only for myself, but maybe I can explain.
My mind abhors chaos, but it abhors dealing with chaos even more. It doesn't like dealing with emails, triaging them is a pain when I could be doing something interesting instead. My mind gets repelled by my email inbox, I have to force myself, and I mean FORCE myself to do things with it.
Then there's the chance of getting sucked in by an email that is not that important but takes a lot of time, but somehow my mind latches onto it and needs it done right now. So, even just dipping in for a quick check can escalate.
Some days it's easier, but it's heavily dependent of other circumstances that keep changing.
All of this (and more) makes it very hard to establish a routine around it. And because dealing with emails repels me so much, for work I usually go through periods where I start with a clean inbox, then stuff accumulates until I get fed up enough to put on my rubber gloves and clean it again. My personal email just accumulates.
That being said, I still get things done, of course. It just looks messy, which btw is very different from the code that I write and like to surround myself with, which is sparkly clean.
I hope that shines a light on why other people's inboxes might be different from yours.
I also find myself baffled by other people's habits and behaviors sometimes. I think these differences often boil down to that different people find different things easier or harder than others. But it's quite hard to keep that in mind, let alone what it might actually feel like to be in somebody else's brain.
For work, I'm pretty close to inbox zero... I'll mark unread if I need to followup and cannot at that moment, or if it's related to a yet-uncomplete task I'm waiting on from someone else. But at least once a week it's all empty.
I also tend to only check a couple times a day, and my personal email a couple times a week... similar no notifications. If it's important it will be IM, Text, or heaven forbid an actual voice phone call.
Just use search. If search can't find it then the content wasn't descriptive enough and it is unimportant because the sender obviously didn't care enough to describe it properly.
Don't let lazy people make you more busy than you already are.
If you don’t actually communicate with email then Inbox Infinite seems the way to go. You only go in to search for a confirmation code or receipt for something. This is how I observe most people using email.
For those daily thieves of attention (described here) my approach is to use my inbox itself rather than a new folder. I leave them unread and archive the other garbage. Then I go through the unreads at a scheduled time. How well does this work for me? - not great. It works well enough but maybe I should try this idea instead. The biggest challenge with any of these methods is to develop the discipline to actually schedule and keep the time to review these things.
But the "zero inbox" has nothing to do with "Mindlessly dashing off replies to get them out of my inbox"
It is all about treating your inbox as a todolist
There are a lot of stragglers that haven't realized it's redundancy yet, and madly spend a significant percentage of their time and effort organizing this pulsating mass of ever-changing chaos.
If you keep replying, they'll keep asking.
Cut it down to a quick squizz once a day and get in with the actual productive work.
(My experience written as universal. I'm aware there are some important emails - but I challenge that there aren't as many as you think there are)
Edited to add: you can only work on one thing at a time. It should always be the highest priority item. If something comes in via email, there's little to no likelihood that it should be jumping to the top of the pile (email is not a real-time communication platform, and people who think it is should be corrected). An email is like the first pangs of hunger: at least 24 hours from becoming important.
The problem is not whether I think it's important. The problem is the customer thinking that's important. Or simply that I need to be aware of what they wrote. Or that I need to be aware of what another vendor wrote.
I'm not saying this is right, I'm saying it's where I'm currently sitting at.
The thing you're working on in any given moment is the highest priority thing (in "your" mind) by definition though. If you thought something else was higher priority, you would be doing it instead.
The only "argument" against that requires a third party who deems a different thing higher priority than what you're currently working on, and that leading to a mismatch of what is "highest" priority is, and you're lack of doing it in the moment.
Firstly, the fact that either you are mentioning that there is directory of lists where your email is shown and then the cost of it (lets say a penny) which I assume would become targets of spams so not really worth it
And the other when the other person already has your email and it requires them to send a penny to you to just send it to you but that feels as if an extreme restriction and if you are already facing something like this, then at this point, you probably shouldn't read the messages or create better filters than a penny cost since a penny might not impact spammers but how are you gonna show that it costs a penny for an average person and the average fees of things would make it harder
Honestly at this point a better idea could honestly be to have a signal or matrix or anything where people can message you since it can have higher friction and if someone wants to send you a message, they can send it there as an example as compared to lets say mail.
I still didn't understand the purpose of microtransactions and I thought about it for half an hour but this does feel like it doesn't have much use case. Let me know what you think.
I run a product called Inbox Zero (if you google the term we're the ones that come up first). I often suggest to users that they aim for "Reply Zero". They might get 100 emails per day, but only 5 need a reply. As long as those are handled they're probably good.
One of the challenges people face is that there's so much noise mixed together. Newsletter, conversations, receipts,... what you call "DBTC", and it's time consuming to sort it into buckets. And frankly, before AI it might not have been worth the effort. But with AI assistance, it's actually very doable. Inbox Zero offers it, as do a bunch of others. What you call DBTC could potentially be sorted for you into that folder automatically.
PS. not trying to shill our own product. It's open source so you can even self-host it without paying us anything.