Always Be Quitting

Re:Always Be Quitting by ryandrake on Thursday June 10, 2021 @03:27PM (#27464571)

I'm often firmly in the "this meeting could have been an E-mail" camp, and have sadly sat through my share of those. Unfortunately, often the reason this meeting isn't an E-mail is because the people who need to know and need to act don't read their damn E-mail. Or they don't read it completely, or they read it and don't comprehend it, or they read it but don't take the needed action, or for lots of other reasons. I'd love to treat people like grown-ups and reap the benefits of purely asynchronous office communication, but it's so rare that this happens.

My method now is as follows:

1. Send the E-mail asking for whatever, and an expected time frame

2. If I don't get the requested reply or action in the time frame, gently ping with a chat message

3. If still nothing... Well, here we go: it's meeting time, regrettably

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Re:Always Be Quitting by Tainnor on Friday June 11, 2021 @05:48AM (#27471178)

> don't read their damn E-mail

I also never fully understood this problem, but the other day, someone shared their screen and I saw, I kid you not, 5000+ unread emails. Granted, these were both private and work emails, but still.

I think when something like that happens (and I don't think it's an isolated case), we've completely lost the ability to deal with email in any sort of non-random way. There's a couple of questions I would ask myself there:

- Why am I being CC'd on so many things? (unfortunately, this can often be outside of one's control)

- Why don't I use automatic filtering and tagging?

- Why don't I unsubscribe from marketing emails?

- etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]