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Comment by sambishop | Hacker News Reader

I've always been fascinated by people who seem to have this problem. I've heard multiple individuals describe responding to emails as an infinite attention suck sort of like doomscrolling. For me, email is 99% updates/promotions, 0.99% real humans that I can hit with a one liner, and 0.01% humans that really require a thoughtful response. Something must happen to these email people where they grow prominent enough and advertise their address enough that they get inundated with genuine email that is all from thoughtful humans? Feels like a problem I would enjoy having, at least for a while.

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I can give you an idea of why it's so terrible. I'm a professor that teaches multiple classes, I run our department's grad programs, I do various kinds of service activities within the university, I'm the editor of a journal, I collaborate on research with others, and I get media inquiries from time to time. That's the professional side. I have a family, a house, and just lots of other things that require email correspondence.

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.

What you describe is a job that requires a lot of thoughtful, or at least meaningful, answers to a lot of people. If each answer leads to a context switch, this lands hard on any other work you do. On the comms side, this may well be a full time job; or more.

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.

You're not wrong, but university professors don't necessarily have the authority or budget to hire assistants. And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors and omissions with serious consequences.

Then they have to use what power they have and simply partition the workload into what must be done that is actually doable and the rest. The rest gets done if there is time, otherwise it just gets dropped.

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.

That's not how it works in any sort of job with significant individual responsibility. The institution isn't forcing them to do more work. They take it on voluntarily because they're ambitious or competitive or want to advance a worthy cause. Doing the bare minimum is possible: some people make that choice, and even without a union it usually won't get you fired. But those people usually don't accomplish much. You can't have it both ways.

But if they are ambitiously overloading their schedule with task they can’t handle on their own, they don’t get to complain about the workload they voluntarily signed up 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.

> university professors don't necessarily have the authority or budget to hire assistants.

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.

You overestimate delegation opportunities for most teachers. With what money?

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

Agree with you but would add that even on the professional managerial side it is indeed a luxury - yes for many people it would be possible, but there's also many people (in startups, or small businesses, or not small but struggling businesses) whose options are as limited as teachers.

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.

> As for reducing: research, grad programs, journals, media inquiries - these are not optional for profs

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.

I'm the author of the original article, I'm a tenured professor, and none of these things is optional for me. Indeed, I wrote this article several years into being a full professor, because my obligations had only grown, not reduced, by virtue of all the promotions. Of course different people have different senses of how "obliged" they are or should be.

It is important to clarify what we mean by "obligated / not optional", as I think there is a terminology mismatch.

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.

My mom simply did not respond to emails from students. Or even her faculty. It worked fine for her, except many people considered it rude, but nothing bad happened otherwise. She had an office, an actual one, and whenever it was important enough, people went to the office.

The school should have fired your mom. Students don't always have free time that aligns with instructor office hours, and some issues are best addressed in writing. Whether they like it or not, communicating with students through a variety of channels is absolutely part of a teacher's job. Those who don't want to do it should find another line of work.

Do you expect your mechanic to open their shop at 10pm to work on your car around your schedule?

I expect my mechanic to reply to emails within a reasonable period of time during business hours.

This is a misunderstanding of the job of a professor. (I have some experience here.)

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.

There are a lot of college professors who are just barely good enough at teaching and administration to not get fired. Regardless of how important they think their research is, letting other things slide is disrespectful to their peers and students. We shouldn't make excuses for them.

One of my favorite professors put it in a different way. The classic approach is that they are lecturers first, and not teachers.

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.

> I have a family, a house, and just lots of other things that require email correspondence.

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).

I'm a retired software manager. Email was inherent to the job as the primary way to communicate with people in far-flung countries. I'm guessing I spent 20% of my time in my inbox. Unfortunately, it wasn't in consecutive, large blocks but minutes of time interspersed with meetings, reading, etc. I tried and failed to read email only in larger sessions (although I did sit next to a manager on a plane once who plowed through their email in a single 3-hour session).

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.

I’m a software manager at present - honestly I just ignore email. I do get some emails from customers, but they’re supposed to be communicating through proper channels so their customer success managers need to at minimum be on cc. So if anything is important people can Slack me (including to say “check your email for…”), and if there’s an action needed, I’ll click the little bookmark to add the message to the “Later” section till the issue has been addressed. I won’t in any way claim that I’m well organized, but I am proud that I don’t need to spend more than 20 minutes a week on email, because I hate email.

You basically reinvented e-mail in slack

Slack doesn’t have spam coming from outside my company, and any “apps” that “helpfully” bother me can be silenced easily. Contrast this with email where the inbox fills with useless nonsense constantly.

“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.

> customer success manager

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.

Our CSMs honestly are some of the hardest working and sweetest people I know. They take a sooo much guff from customers, and yet all they can actually do is lobby the product group to plead the case for what their customers are asking for (or beg for someone like me to figure out some weird bug/bad data etc.)

Absolutely, customer support are usually quite busy between a rock and a hard place, without much power to affect change. But, hey, slap a "success" and "manager" label on, and everything is automatically better, isn't it? That's what I mean.

Oh I see you’re welcome hat you were getting at. In a SaaS company, at least the kind I know, those are two very separate functions. CSMs are assigned accounts, and they proactively meet with you monthly or at some appropriate cadence to make sure you’re using the software well and don’t have any concerns. The idea being that if you are using it unsuccessfully, you’re more likely to just not renew your contract. They are evaluated on whether their accounts renew vs. churn.

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.

It generally tends to happen if you either do enough stuff publicly, or own a business.

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).

It greatly depends on your job, and it doesn’t have to be a glamorous job, just one where people request things of you or you of them. For example, a friend is a corporate buyer, somewhat low in his organization, and receives about 120 emails from humans each workday. (His strategy is to select all the emails he will handle that day, put them in a folder, and call himself done when that folder is empty. I.e., he almost never sends a same day response.)

My problem isn't with email or Slack. It's with WhatsApp and Telegram. It's the official channel for many things now, except it's not one channel, it's 50 or so. Wedding invites, family dinner invites, everything goes into there. They look no different to the overembellished spam about how (insert race) puts AIDS blood in our butter.

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.

> 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.

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.

For a moment I think, maybe I'm exaggerating. So I open up Telegram.

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.

Yea whatsapp is just a cognitive overload nightmare. Everybody is now scheduling important stuff there, inbetween unstructured spam and whatnot, its the worst channel of them all.

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.

I can feel you. I tend to ignore WhatsApp messages at all or take up to 2-3 weeks to respond (as soon as I'm in the mood for it). People around me know that and mostly just call if they want something. Problem solved (IMHO).

> For me, email is 99% updates/promotions, 0.99% real humans

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.

I wonder why spam in personal email is acceptable but spam in work email is not. Why can’t we do both?

Why am I downvoted? Did people think I was suggesting spam in both?

Spam in personal email is not so much acceptable as unavoidable. I didn't vote either way.

That’s the point I’m making though. Why is it unavoidable in personal but not unavoidable in work?

Work email will be very different from job to job as well. Many orgs have basically declared bankruptcy on email and moved peofessional communication to other channels.

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.

My work email is barely better. If it matters it reaches me in Teams (ugh, unfortunately). Email is full of spam, most of it company-internal (no I don’t give a shit about yet another “newsletter” that you probably had an LLM write anyway, because why wouldn’t you, because it’s fake work anyway)

Do you have a school age child? My inbox is flooded with school updates, fund raisers, random questions, and is double when my two kids aren't at the same school.

You nailed it:

< FOR ME >

Substitute Slack for Email?

my personal email is like yours. my work email is like the post.

I’m with you, I’ve had a range of professional jobs, but rarely much meaningful correspondence via email. There are definitely emails that might announce some deadline or deliverable, but the “email” part of the work might be adding a calendar reminder or something, not responding to it. If feels like (I’m sure people will disagree) email would be more of a time sink for people who have a secretarial or personal assistant role, where they are being asked to do lots of little things (get me time with your boss this week type stuff). For a developer, whether IC or manager, most coordination would take place through other channels, and not be a material part of the work.

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