One of the great things about email, versus IMs and other more real-time forms of communication is that it gives the recipient the ability to address it in a more offline manner. In that way, I’ve always viewed it as more respective of people’s schedule and work habits, since it’s naturally asynchronous.
So I’m having trouble following the idea that people would view it as intrusive and obnoxious while also saying that the only way to get a reply from them the same week is to get in front of them with a real-time communication like a call or physical visit–way more disruptive to concentration.
The benefit of things like Slack is that you can ask a group instead of a specific individual, so I treat group chats like others treat email. You can do that with email, but there’s always the risk that someone will forget to reply all (so multiple people will try to do the same work), or the annoyance that someone replies to the group accidentally. With Slack, I can easily check if someone has responded at my regular check interval.
I very rarely directly message anyone on Slack, because that’s disruptive to their workflow. In the odd case where it needs to go to a single recipient and isn’t urgent, I’ll prefix the message with “not urgent” so they know they can safely ignore the message. The net result is that I can fit multiple use-cases into one system (broadcasts, less urgent one-on-one communication, urgent one-on-one communication), so I only need to check the one place.
At one company before we switched to Slack, I would have to check:
email - beginning and end of day
IM - only one-on-one, check 3-4x/day
notes on my desk - whenever I returned to my desk
in-person - people were bad at checking email, so I’d to physical followups periodically
Email was our primary communication method, and that had some issues:
I’d spend way more time answering an email than I do w/ Slack because I want to anticipate as many questions as I can to keep the email conversation short
we didn’t have groups properly set up, so inevitably we’d forget to add someone to the email chain, which means forwards and whatnot to keep everyone in the loop
emails would frequently turn into in-person communication because something that seemed less urgent became more urgent
Slack fixed a number of these issues:
time - whenever I get an urgent notification, I’ll go through and respond to a bunch of less urgent notifications while waiting for a response
anyone can add anyone to a group, or you can add yourself if you browse groups
it’s trivial to bump a notification in Slack by @ mentioning someone, either in a reply to a comment, or in a channel
I can usually hold 3-4 separate conversations at the same time in Slack, which I think has reduced our need for meetings. I can give short responses without having to anticipate other potential questions, because I know they’ll probably respond soon. So I end up engaging with Slack more often than email, but I spend less total time using it vs email because I don’t need to think through my responses nearly as carefully.
I check my email like I check my mail, once every couple of days - once a week. We have faster modes of communication and (especially in a work setting) if something is time sensitive you can give me a call or text/IM.
If checking my email somewhat regularly means people will call/IM me less, sign me up. I can’t get anything done with synchronous communication on the regular.
I mean, all of this is subjective and relative to context, but if someone can’t even respond to let you know they’re working on it in under a week, you probably have multiple other issues in your company beyond the individual.
And what does “fast” mean? I’m sending emails that are not urgent to respond to, but it feels like that lack of urgency is milked for all it is worth.
I send them to people I know are in meetings all day. That way it’s harder for it to get lost. When 6 weeks go by and they’ve responded in no way, I don’t think the problem is that I sent it as an email. Even if it were only like 6 business days, that just feels like they’re either extremely disorganized or doing the job of three people (not the case with the biggest offenders at my company).
I honestly don’t check my work email at all unless I’m expecting something. Like 95% of the stuff there is crap from corporate (person X in dept. Y is retiring, make sure to fill out that survey, etc), and if it’s important, someone will mention it in our team meetings and I’ll search my email for it. All of our real work happens on Slack (so #2), so we pretty much never go beyond #3.
This certainly varies by company and role, but at least for mine, emails are where you send something if you want to say you sent it, but don’t actually want to follow up. So if we have a transient issue with one of our cloud services, I’ll email their support department and consider the matter resolved. Maybe they’ll fix it eventually, maybe they won’t, but it’s not worth my time to actually follow up. But if they do respond, that’s pretty cool!
That said, if your company culture is to respond to emails quickly, then that’s different. I’ve just never worked at a company or role like that, all of my actual work is over IM or meetings.
I mean, again, I wouldn’t classify my personal expectation of a week or two to be “quickly” by a long shot. The usual offender here would expect me to respond to any communication channel, about anything, within minutes or hours. The company culture doesn’t really set any explicit expectations about email other than it shouldn’t be a channel for super quick communication.
To me in most of the cases I deal with, it’s a common courtesy issue. Questions about a major product that millions of people use in production shouldn’t be ignored, but they often are. If I sent the emails as Slack instead, it has historically been even worse of a problem because they are usually in a meeting and forget to come back to it later.
emails are where you send something if you want to say you sent it, but don’t actually want to follow up
If that were remotely the case, I’d never even check my email. That’s an odd standard to have, imo.
Then that person is a hypocrite. If they’re expecting responses quickly, but using a medium that’s not designed for fast responses, that’s on them and you should tell them as much.
because they are usually in a meeting and forget to come back to it later
Then ping them again. If it truly is important enough to send an IM over, it’s important enough to follow up after a couple hours.
I’d never even check my email
And that’s why I and pretty much my whole team doesn’t check their email very often. Occasionally there’s something interesting or useful, but almost never. Email is there to broadcast messages to the group that don’t fit nicely into an IM, and they’re usually accompanied with an IM to the group to look for that email.
That’s how every company I’ve worked at has operated. I’m not in sales or customer support, so it’s really not part of my job expectations to deal with email. If something needs to go to another department, it’s probably above my pay grade anyway, so I’ll ask someone else to handle it. I manage a team with almost zero interaction with anyone outside our group, and whenever I need to do something over email, I get explicitly asked to do so (e.g. I had to submit some paperwork for one of my employee’s immigration work, which I did follow up on promptly over email).
We do family reunions every year as well, and those are organized on email, but my parents send a text whenever there’s something important there (e.g. voting on where to go, what to do, etc). I pay attention to the email for the next couple weeks until things get resolved, then I go back to largely ignoring it.
I’m trying to do better about it, but honestly, there’s almost zero repercussions for ignoring it. The things I’ve missed are miniscule to the amount of time I’ve saved by ignoring it.
You apparently live in a world where email shouldn’t exist and almost doesn’t. Even as a software engineer who rarely does anything important via email, I do not come close to living in that same world as you.
As for telling someone high in the company that they are a hypocrite, so much easier said than done.
Yes, it can be hard, but honestly, if I worked at a place where I wasn’t comfortable calling out hypocrisy, I’d look for another job. I tell the people who work for me to call out my own BS, and if I don’t fix it, to report me to my boss.
In fact, that’s related to how I left my last job after working there for 10-ish years. My boss (CEO) fired me because I pissed off his wife (President) by not working crazy hours. I had been there >10 hours, and was notified of a problem and helped fix it from home. They were both there only 3-4 hours/day and did a lot of WFH, but we weren’t allowed to do that. They ended up keeping me as an outside contractor for a couple years because my contributions were so highly valued, but they didn’t want me showing up in-person anymore (I apparently really pissed off his wife when I stood up for myself).
Work culture means a lot to me. If email is a core part of the company work culture, I’ll push back on noisy emails and get a good system in place. If it’s not, I’m upfront about largely ignoring the company email and ask people to contact me in other ways.
Man you are way overblowing all of this so much. Email is not a big part of my work culture. I’m just complaining about how annoying people are who don’t communicate worth a shit. Every company has those people. Doesn’t need to happen often to be annoying, even
Also I find it a bit perplexing that you seem to suggest all emails carry the same weight (and that weight is nothing?). Within half a second I can easily look at a new email and tell if I can ignore it because they are sent to hundreds of people and doesn’t require my attention. In the same half a second I can tell if it’s from an individual, clearly making it something I should look at.
Maybe you’re so averse to email because you get far more of it than I do? I have a couple folders for automated notifications that automatically get sorted, but excluding those I probably only get like 30 work emails a week. Even after a vacation it’s not a lot of effort to go through the entire inbox.
I cannot believe I’m in the position of arguing in favor of emails mattering enough to reply to. I’m not even sure what your point is. Did I say that I love email? I simply said if we’re going to even have it, you should be able to get a damned response to one.
If you need a fast response, don’t use email. In general, here’s my order of urgency and expected time to resolution:
I try to go as far down that list as possible, but no further.
If you’re getting frustrated, it means you’re probably going too far down that list.
This is wild to me, to be honest.
One of the great things about email, versus IMs and other more real-time forms of communication is that it gives the recipient the ability to address it in a more offline manner. In that way, I’ve always viewed it as more respective of people’s schedule and work habits, since it’s naturally asynchronous.
So I’m having trouble following the idea that people would view it as intrusive and obnoxious while also saying that the only way to get a reply from them the same week is to get in front of them with a real-time communication like a call or physical visit–way more disruptive to concentration.
The benefit of things like Slack is that you can ask a group instead of a specific individual, so I treat group chats like others treat email. You can do that with email, but there’s always the risk that someone will forget to reply all (so multiple people will try to do the same work), or the annoyance that someone replies to the group accidentally. With Slack, I can easily check if someone has responded at my regular check interval.
I very rarely directly message anyone on Slack, because that’s disruptive to their workflow. In the odd case where it needs to go to a single recipient and isn’t urgent, I’ll prefix the message with “not urgent” so they know they can safely ignore the message. The net result is that I can fit multiple use-cases into one system (broadcasts, less urgent one-on-one communication, urgent one-on-one communication), so I only need to check the one place.
At one company before we switched to Slack, I would have to check:
Email was our primary communication method, and that had some issues:
Slack fixed a number of these issues:
I can usually hold 3-4 separate conversations at the same time in Slack, which I think has reduced our need for meetings. I can give short responses without having to anticipate other potential questions, because I know they’ll probably respond soon. So I end up engaging with Slack more often than email, but I spend less total time using it vs email because I don’t need to think through my responses nearly as carefully.
I check my email like I check my mail, once every couple of days - once a week. We have faster modes of communication and (especially in a work setting) if something is time sensitive you can give me a call or text/IM.
If checking my email somewhat regularly means people will call/IM me less, sign me up. I can’t get anything done with synchronous communication on the regular.
I mean, all of this is subjective and relative to context, but if someone can’t even respond to let you know they’re working on it in under a week, you probably have multiple other issues in your company beyond the individual.
And what does “fast” mean? I’m sending emails that are not urgent to respond to, but it feels like that lack of urgency is milked for all it is worth. I send them to people I know are in meetings all day. That way it’s harder for it to get lost. When 6 weeks go by and they’ve responded in no way, I don’t think the problem is that I sent it as an email. Even if it were only like 6 business days, that just feels like they’re either extremely disorganized or doing the job of three people (not the case with the biggest offenders at my company).
I honestly don’t check my work email at all unless I’m expecting something. Like 95% of the stuff there is crap from corporate (person X in dept. Y is retiring, make sure to fill out that survey, etc), and if it’s important, someone will mention it in our team meetings and I’ll search my email for it. All of our real work happens on Slack (so #2), so we pretty much never go beyond #3.
This certainly varies by company and role, but at least for mine, emails are where you send something if you want to say you sent it, but don’t actually want to follow up. So if we have a transient issue with one of our cloud services, I’ll email their support department and consider the matter resolved. Maybe they’ll fix it eventually, maybe they won’t, but it’s not worth my time to actually follow up. But if they do respond, that’s pretty cool!
That said, if your company culture is to respond to emails quickly, then that’s different. I’ve just never worked at a company or role like that, all of my actual work is over IM or meetings.
I mean, again, I wouldn’t classify my personal expectation of a week or two to be “quickly” by a long shot. The usual offender here would expect me to respond to any communication channel, about anything, within minutes or hours. The company culture doesn’t really set any explicit expectations about email other than it shouldn’t be a channel for super quick communication.
To me in most of the cases I deal with, it’s a common courtesy issue. Questions about a major product that millions of people use in production shouldn’t be ignored, but they often are. If I sent the emails as Slack instead, it has historically been even worse of a problem because they are usually in a meeting and forget to come back to it later.
If that were remotely the case, I’d never even check my email. That’s an odd standard to have, imo.
Then that person is a hypocrite. If they’re expecting responses quickly, but using a medium that’s not designed for fast responses, that’s on them and you should tell them as much.
Then ping them again. If it truly is important enough to send an IM over, it’s important enough to follow up after a couple hours.
And that’s why I and pretty much my whole team doesn’t check their email very often. Occasionally there’s something interesting or useful, but almost never. Email is there to broadcast messages to the group that don’t fit nicely into an IM, and they’re usually accompanied with an IM to the group to look for that email.
That’s how every company I’ve worked at has operated. I’m not in sales or customer support, so it’s really not part of my job expectations to deal with email. If something needs to go to another department, it’s probably above my pay grade anyway, so I’ll ask someone else to handle it. I manage a team with almost zero interaction with anyone outside our group, and whenever I need to do something over email, I get explicitly asked to do so (e.g. I had to submit some paperwork for one of my employee’s immigration work, which I did follow up on promptly over email).
We do family reunions every year as well, and those are organized on email, but my parents send a text whenever there’s something important there (e.g. voting on where to go, what to do, etc). I pay attention to the email for the next couple weeks until things get resolved, then I go back to largely ignoring it.
I’m trying to do better about it, but honestly, there’s almost zero repercussions for ignoring it. The things I’ve missed are miniscule to the amount of time I’ve saved by ignoring it.
You apparently live in a world where email shouldn’t exist and almost doesn’t. Even as a software engineer who rarely does anything important via email, I do not come close to living in that same world as you.
As for telling someone high in the company that they are a hypocrite, so much easier said than done.
Yes, it can be hard, but honestly, if I worked at a place where I wasn’t comfortable calling out hypocrisy, I’d look for another job. I tell the people who work for me to call out my own BS, and if I don’t fix it, to report me to my boss.
In fact, that’s related to how I left my last job after working there for 10-ish years. My boss (CEO) fired me because I pissed off his wife (President) by not working crazy hours. I had been there >10 hours, and was notified of a problem and helped fix it from home. They were both there only 3-4 hours/day and did a lot of WFH, but we weren’t allowed to do that. They ended up keeping me as an outside contractor for a couple years because my contributions were so highly valued, but they didn’t want me showing up in-person anymore (I apparently really pissed off his wife when I stood up for myself).
Work culture means a lot to me. If email is a core part of the company work culture, I’ll push back on noisy emails and get a good system in place. If it’s not, I’m upfront about largely ignoring the company email and ask people to contact me in other ways.
Man you are way overblowing all of this so much. Email is not a big part of my work culture. I’m just complaining about how annoying people are who don’t communicate worth a shit. Every company has those people. Doesn’t need to happen often to be annoying, even
Also I find it a bit perplexing that you seem to suggest all emails carry the same weight (and that weight is nothing?). Within half a second I can easily look at a new email and tell if I can ignore it because they are sent to hundreds of people and doesn’t require my attention. In the same half a second I can tell if it’s from an individual, clearly making it something I should look at.
Maybe you’re so averse to email because you get far more of it than I do? I have a couple folders for automated notifications that automatically get sorted, but excluding those I probably only get like 30 work emails a week. Even after a vacation it’s not a lot of effort to go through the entire inbox.
That half a second to check an email is a meaningful context switch that disrupts flow.
I cannot believe I’m in the position of arguing in favor of emails mattering enough to reply to. I’m not even sure what your point is. Did I say that I love email? I simply said if we’re going to even have it, you should be able to get a damned response to one.
My point is that expecting someone to read an email on your timetable is not reasonable because it is a massive, productivity burning distraction.
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