What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month
dougbelshaw.com
dougbelshaw.com
Its an asynchronous medium, like the postal service. Its not a conversation on the telephone. Replies are not expected to be instant. Anybody that calls you up 1 hour later to find out why you've not answered is clearly "doing it wrong"®. Use the correct tool for the job.
The guy could have stopped spamming people and just answered his emails once a month instead for the same effect.
People that claim email is a bind or that they are a slave to it should have it removed and see how they prefer life.
It is _incredibly_ infuriating when people are out for 2 weeks and don't alert you to this fact. You end up wasting time waiting for a repsonse when you culd have immediately sought assistance from an alternative contact.
It's not spam. It's polite and helpful.
It turns out that the frustration you feel is the problem of someone not replying, it is you externalising your problems as other peoples fault. If you really need a response quickly pick up the phone, get a synchronous answer via a synchronous medium.
Not at all, unless frequent contacts are expected in which case you should be warned through other channels.
> You end up wasting time waiting for a repsonse when you culd have immediately sought assistance from an alternative contact.
If you need fast turnaround, use a fast turnaround transport. That's what instant messengers or phones are for.
> It's not spam. It's polite and helpful.
I completely disagree, especially when the numbskull using out-of-office replies can't be arsed to turn it off for mailing lists. It's spammy, impolite and unhelpful.
Mail server are supposed not to reply to bulk email automatically.
Obviously, this differs. At my actual job, email is the "need a response today" communication, while instant messaging or phone is "need a response now". Out-of-office messages are invaluable to know if someone is just out today, in which case things are fine, or they are out for two weeks, in which case I need to find their delegate.
Email is a great "electronic mail" system but a miserable trouble ticketing system. None the less, just like "Excel" is the corporate standard database system, in practice email is the corporate standard ticketing system. Of course it doesn't work very well, but incorrect application of the tool, is not the fault of the tool.
Think of an asynchronous ajax call. It may be ok to wait 5 seconds, but not 5 days.
I find far more intrusive the phone call that could have been taken care of via email. I deal with this because a community service group I work with has a lot of elder people. They like to call. Yes, I understand it's Tuesday, and we have a meeting Friday, but I can answer you in two hours (by email). Don't interrupt me right now (by calling). But it can't wait two weeks.
Vacation messages, when emailing individuals? Yeah, in the technical sphere, they are generally considered kinda rude. In the business sphere, the opposite. So yeah, here on hn, with a foot in both camps, eh, just make sure you don't vacation message a mailing list.
From the Sieve vacation RFC https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5230#page-8
Implementations SHOULD NOT respond to any message that contains a
"List-Id" [RFC2919], "List-Help", "List-Subscribe", "List-
Unsubscribe", "List-Post", "List-Owner", or "List-Archive" [RFC2369]
header field.Synchronous communication is not a solution for that when interruptions are undesirable.
* People will seek you out if they think they need you urgently. It doesn't matter there's a 24 hour help desk available by phone or IM to answer the same question.
* Colleagues will IM you every time they see you online, even if it's 1am and you only signed on because you're on-call and need to fix something urgently.
* Some issues resolve themselves if you don’t answer straight away, but they won't tell you, so you still spend time answering them.
* Email is a chore to many people, so they don't bother to read what you said, even if it helps them out.
I have since turned it off, but people remain a lot more respectful of my time (I may now be perceived as a dick because of it).
Also WTF for being on IRC but not email.
My particular perception switcher was when people started starting side conversations by forwarding JIRA ticket email notifications to me with comments etc and emails with ticket references in asking questions.
I rejected these with a simple filter [A-Z]{1,3}-[0-9]{1,6} with "write it on the damn ticket, peon" (in slightly friendlier language).
Everything turns up on tickets now and I get 4-5 emails a day compared to 80-100.
While having a good relationship with your coworkers is an important part of being an employee; I am here to do my work. So if "I am a dick who gets stuff done" so be it :) .
Sometimes people would call in and through the process of describing the issue they would figure out exactly what they needed to do, they just needed to talk it out.
I think this is true for lots of things.
System down for an hour to convert data while XYZ software was shut off to upgrade from 1.2.3 to 2.3.4 last week while you were not answering email? Solution, don't upgrade XYZ software from 1.2.3 to 2.3.4 again, seems simple enough.
Also in the real world random end users are free to request absolutely any imaginable feature or capability which management via budgets or goals have already declared will not be done. So waiting for some higher up to deliver the bad news when you can't deliver the bad news, is perfectly valid assuming you have a reasonable excuse. Oh you'd like it quadruple redundant as long as that redundancy is free? Yes I'd like that too, but it isn't happening.
Basically work email is horrible, do all you can to stop it.
It creates individual silos of knowledge that only people included are party to, whenever someone leaves they take this with them (would you start a job and take on someone else's old mailbox, yuck!)
It drags people into work 24/7, especially in global organisations but also in 9-5 local time type places, yuck!
I've worked hard to get everyone at the start-up I work at to stop sending each other emails and use yammer instead - this has worked remarkably well especially among the techies.
Make your life better and do what you can to stop using email.
I prefer written communication since I find it more deliberate, and therefore more productive ultimately (more thought goes into writing than into a phone conversation; the pace is slower). Email lets me keep my written communication all in one place.
I can see how it would create silos; I try to be liberal in cc'ing others to avoid this and to be inclusive.
I don't understand how email drags people in to work in off-hours. I don't typically expect people to have access to work email off-hours, although I realize many do (myself included). For urgent questions yes, I'll pick up the phone.
To be clear, I get 100+ emails on a typical business day. I'm sure if you get a lot more, a different strategy might be necessary to manage them all.
I am not trying to convert anyone but I would hate to get 100+ emails a day, how do you get anything else done?
Since Monday morning (all of Monday and 3/4 of Tuesday) I have had 21 emails, mostly I have been cc'd by customers and they are irrelevant for me.
For the out of work hours thing I have had a lot of emails out of hours and felt that I had to reply - I do accept that if I turn off emails out of work then I'm less likely to be dragged in out of work and maybe other people can read stuff and put it to the back of their minds or just ignore!
I really felt it liberating to stop receiving so much email, I highly recommend it!
I run 200+ most days and a LONG time ago (decades ago) I set up three rule based inboxs or whatever you want to call it, the junk that I know is junk and will not look at unless I'm actively searching, could be important but probably isn't (more or less the default), and the real inbox which is very carefully filtered, only certain from addresses and certain subjects.
The name of the game is making as many rules as possible to permanently shovel junk out of your official inbox and as few rules as possible to shovel real content into your "real inbox"
To say people get personally offended if they are (in their incorrect opinion) miscategorized would be a profound understatement. Always pretend you're incompetent WRT email (I've only been using email on the internet since 1991, I'm a total noob, so sorry) and I have no idea how to write rules and regexes when confronted.
About 3/5 of emails I get I delete without looking at in one folder, 1/5 I just glance at the subject line in that folder about once a day (usually the morning) and then delete, and the remainder I actually care about enough to read. Of those I read, most are irrelevant read and delete. In terms of actual actionable items I get about one per weekday from email.
Is it "safe" to simply delete emails, unread? Sure. I honestly forget stuff occasionally, probably more often than I incorrectly delete email.
The more intense the CYA culture, the more emails are sent but the fewer are read. It inevitably converges on a blogging model where everyone could read what everyone else is doing, but no one actually reads anything because there's just too much. If you send an email you've proactively given yourself the opportunity to blame the victim, who doesn't like that?
"If you send an email you've proactively given yourself the opportunity to blame the victim, who doesn't like that?" - there is a lot to love in that, maybe I will fire up outlook!
I've spent a fair amount of my programming career automating humans out of inhumane jobs, so if anything it feels like work to me, rather than treading water or grinding. Human beings shouldn't have to read a weekly email announcing Casual Jeans Day Is Friday every single week or whatever.
There is some grind game aspect to it. Some people grind their virtual farm production, I grind the minimization of my real email inbox. Some days I login and see I have no real emails at all. Cool!
Frankly though, deal with it - because a phone call is even worse (if you have phones in the office anymore, I don't think I have).
Love the experiment, and being explicit about this type of social contract would help many of us have better communication patterns.
Don't these limitations make it a dangerous medium for discussing detailed and / or sensitive project-related issues?
EDIT: I guess there are direct messages, but I'm not sure how often they're used because I don't use Twitter.
Works well. :-)