Don't send that email – saves me a few hours per week | Hacker News Reader

Don't send that email – saves me a few hours per week

6 pointsccvannorman5 comments

After co-founding Mathbreakers I would sometimes get into long, complicated email chains with my cofounder, arguing about which path to take or what was the best decision at this point. Often I will find myself having received an email from my co-founder, friend, or family member that is asking me to "weigh in" on a future decision as if it's time critical and will matter tomorrow.

Before hitting reply I now ask myself -- what if I don't?

Nine times out of ten I'm able to say, "I don't need to even have this conversation. It's not time critical, and when it IS time critical we can discuss it then, but chances are good it will never even get to that point."

So I delete my draft and move on with my life, all the time that email chain would have sucked up now freed up for playing Go or doing more development work.

I wish someone had told me not to send those emails years ago, I could have saved many hours of headaches talking about problems that weren't even relevant.

Has anyone else experienced this evolution of how you reply to (or don't) to emails?

May I suggest trying Slack?

People behave very differently depending on the UX of the communication tool involved. Moving to a tool which reframes the implicit social contract of the conversation can do a lot to relieve problem points.

Email supports large asynchronous messages with no global threading. Which means people are free to shoot off as many as they feel like, as often as they feel like, and each of those drops an anvil on your todo list.

Refactoring that as a chat room with distinct threads only for distinct topics means that you can only talk for so long without realizing that you're tossing a big rambling mess in someone else's lap without digesting it first. It's also an "asynchronous realtime" conversation that you can pick up, step back from as needed (concentrating on code, phone call, support tickets, etc.) and search later if you need to. Seems simple, but very different UX, and tends to be more civilized as a result.

Then use Trello or whatever on the side, for a communal view of persistent tasks & their progress. And email, but only when you actually NEED it, not for every damn intra-office conversation.

Being more restrained about email helps, and is necessary anyway, but you can only get so far with that approach. The tool itself is feeding the problem, and while you can do a lot to train your team to have better email etiquette, it works better in the long run to meet the need with something that doesn't have the same structural issues.

I love Slack but if you can dish out some money - try Flowdock because you can tag conversations within streams! It's my favourite feature.

A couple of years ago, I experimented with not even maintaining an email address for a bit. It's great to be in that position if your job enables you to do so: communication then occurs using live channels such as telephone, Skype, etc., or using a forum. I'd add Slack to that list if I were to do it again nowadays.

The next best thing is to make your contacts prefer to not use email. At one point, I went as far as setting up an auto-reply that went something like: "Note: I do emails once per day between 5 and 6pm. Please prefer Skype or telephone if your communication needs a timely reply or is longer than a few short sentences." It sets the expectation that responses will be slow and that long emails basically won't be read.

Surely it depends on the type of person you're talking to.

Some people like long, detailed discussions with others, including references, etc, and find it frustrating when that doesn't happen. Others don't. I don't believe there's a 'right'. Different strokes for different folks.

Though when I don't need to send an email AND the receiver doesn't need to get it, I totally agree.

One of the best pieces of advice that I ever came across regarding email was "If you are replying to someones reply pick up the the phone/go talk to the person or let it go."

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