alt Hacker NewsI'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'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.
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).
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.