I’ll admit, email for me is a problem.
You could attribute it to my personality, my upbringing, past experiences or simply the medium as it is. For me, an inbox of ‘all read’ emails is somewhat important.
I’ll emphasize somewhat because email doesn’t supersede more pressing activities like project related work and while I may seem to be a prompt responder I actually do a lot of different things almost simultaneously in time-slices.
First off, my work email inbox is virtually devoid of any kind of private emails and generally my private emails don’t get looked at while I am at work. It’s not self praise, it’s simply a fact, almost no personal email is so pressing it needs to have a response within the hour – the end of the day will do.
My preference is a clean separation of work related correspondence and personal correspondence. I know some people view their work-life to be truly meshed with their personal lives but for me at least, email is something I can and prefer, to keep segregated.
The content of my mailbox is therefore relatively tidy on any given day. It could include the proverbial spam, newsletters and various bits and pieces of correspondence with colleagues, vendors, business partners and customers some read, some flagged and some unread.
A significant portion of my email comes from distribution lists and auto notifications from systems like bug tracking systems – i think for many product managers this is pretty normal.
I can’t help feeling that if the author George Orwell were to rewrite his book 1984 today, say as 2024 and saw how people worked in offices he would have a different view of the way we work. Although email wasn’t as ubiquitous in 1984 as it is today, the work undertaken by character Winston Smith as a government worker in 1984 would be less about paper and more keyboard work as he rewrote and redocumented history. While Smith wasn’t doing email correspondence, today he likely would be. We can infer this because a lot of the political teeth grinding and arm wrestling in the press lately has depended on wiki leaks comprising a lot of email correspondence from governmental and quasi governmental sources – it’s portable, infinitely replicable and prolific. The wheels of government love correspondence!
Summer breaks
Coming back from a summer break, my email inbox was crammed with close to a thousand unread emails. For some this would be very distressing. For others, it’s simply an accepted reality that they either deal with deftly with a delete all or like me, something that needs to be picked through and considered.
I read almost no email while I was out, some people simply cannot do this, I do not ‘fear’ the bulging mailbox.
This disengaged behaviour for me, was largely due to access reasons but also because it is important to fully disconnect from work for periods of time that are designated as work-breaks. Work-life balance? Ok if you say so….
Much has been made of the social injustice imposed by an always-on always-accessible virtual work and office environment and email is just one facet of that.
Time and time again though, my family will lay into me about doing work related activities after-hours or on weekends – for some of us it is almost unavoidable. For an interesting view on how email after work can stress people out take a look at a study authored by Liuba Belkin of Lehigh University, William Becker of Virginia Tech and Samantha Conroy of Colorado State University on the topic. I don’t view it that way for myself but I can understand how some folks get stressed out.
At the end of the first day back at work, I was down to some fifty odd unread emails. I closed my laptop and went home – I am not so OCD that I need to be down to zero.
I will pick them up on the next work day, I might pick them up at home or on a mobile device but they likely aren’t that pressing. Why or how? You might ask.
The strategy I used is fairly straightforward.
When I started my day I worked back from the latest received emails. Pressing issues that need prompt responses or remain unanswered, tend to get asked numerous times and for better or worse get escalated. So an email subject that comes up numerous times in one day or in sequential days probably needs a response.
As long as I have cleared the last ten days or so of correspondence, my conditioned logic tells me that there’s nothing so critical out there that it needs an answer that cannot wait a little longer. For a considered commentary on this topic take a read of Amy Morin’s article on Forbes on this topic. There are some great points in there.
My approach is biased towards the he who shouts loudest gets the most attention approach but then my view is isn’t that how most organizations work anyway? In the absence of an egalitarian and well considered program of email prioritization of discussion topics and questions, this is probably more than adequate.
I know some people are not fans of the email treadmill like Tony Hsieh of Zappos – what he calls the Yesterbox. I also know that for some people, email is considered very inefficient and impractical like Thierry Breton of Atos who had a mission of zero email. One colleague of mine was simply quite unreliable to communicate with via email, it was a hit-and-miss affair. If you wanted an answer, instant messenger was probably your best bet!
Being global
The asynchronous nature of email means that if you need an answer to a question desperately then it is not particularly good at all. But then consider that I grew up in an era of posted letters with postage stamps being the most commonly used way for people to communicate across distances – phones existed, but making phone calls was considered expensive and unnecessarily intrusive – it’s an old fashioned approach I know but then that’s what it is.
Consider this too, unless the person that you want to communicate with is easily accessible to you by phone, some messaging app or physical location, how can you best communicate with them in a reliable and consistent way?
The people I work with are scattered across the globe, for many of them, English is not their first language and most importantly, many of them are in different time zones and physically far away from me.
When their work day begins, I am possibly asleep, sitting in front of the television or out-and-about, away from a workstation or the office. If they have a response, question, comment or opinion and can clearly articulate it, I can respond with minimal effort and inconvenience to me.
Consider the etiquette of email though, it is not appropriate for all kinds of communication – a recent article on FastCompany by Lisa Evans has some good pointers around this topic entitled 7 Email habits you need to break.
Another view is that you should not be waiting around for email to come in, monitoring your emails means you are always in ‘respond mode’ as opposed to creating dialog and generating ideas and making your thoughts known but this assumes that your role and sole purpose is to be always being creative.
For some of us, creativity is what our role is all about but the harsh reality is that many of us are in fact there to be at the beck and call of others – questions need answers – you might be the virtual font of knowledge for others.
Some of us are engaged to in fact be “responders” but at the same time you shouldn’t assume that being someone who responds to emails is something that prevents you from being creative.
What’s your view on email and where it fits in your work regime and how do you deal with an email backlog on your first day back at work?
The original version of this post was made on LinkedIn
About the author
Clinton Jones has experience in international enterprise technology and business process on four continents and has a focus on integrated enterprise business technologies, business change and business transformation. Clinton also serves as a technical consultant on technology and quality management as it relates to data and process management and governance. In past roles, Clinton has worked for Fortune 500 companies and non-profits across the globe.
