How's your work email inbox looking ?

salonfire wrote: »

People who can't manage their email cannot manage their job, simple as that.

Fcuk those people showing off their 1400 unread emails as a bad of honour and their "I'm important, if they want me they'll call me" attitude.

I had one of those at work and never would call him, kept sending emails knowing they were being ignored.

Until one day something big blew up, yet he was notified in ample time by email.

He was taught a lesson and now diligently checks his email like the rest of us.

I agree for the most part but you also have people who define their work tasks by their email stack. They prioritise based off their last email which leads to constant context switching and is horribly inefficient. A prioritised to-do list at the start of each day should trump all the 'important' emails throughout the day. Obviously there will be exceptions where the to-do list needs to be revised during a day. People are not able to perform 'deep work' if they are constantly checking emails and changing tack.

People that are getting more emails during Covid than before are doing it wrong and need to invest in collaboration tools.

salonfire wrote: »

People who can't manage their email cannot manage their job, simple as that.

Fcuk those people showing off their 1400 unread emails as a bad of honour and their "I'm important, if they want me they'll call me" attitude.

I had one of those at work and never would call him, kept sending emails knowing they were being ignored.

Until one day something big blew up, yet he was notified in ample time by email.

He was taught a lesson and now diligently checks his email like the rest of us.

Same goes for those that hide their online status in the IM app of choice. Its a work tool, you shouldnt be skiving off like a schoolchild.

_Brian wrote: »

I’ve gotten a year high of 11 emails this week, 8 of those was a bunch of people back slapping over an award that was won.

In my last job I got 7-800 a week.

I like this job.

Can relate. I reckon I get between 5-10 mails tops per day, and I don’t even need to respond to half of them. It’s an SME. I am not in production, nor am I customer-facing, so I am not subject to critical deadlines or anything like that.

When I log off, my evenings are entirely free, zero nighttime IMs or texts unlike my previous role. I don’t ever want to go back to my past industry or do customer account management ever again. This place is the least stressed I’ve been at work in over 10 years

We have spoken about people including the world and their mother on emails which contain reports and communications that about 70% of the people who they copy .. don’t fûcking need or want to be receiving the email or information contained...

It seems to be a weird fetish with some people...usually managers.

Ohhh i was assigned the end of week internal operations report... all 12 people in my team need to be of receipt of it, and the entire management team... so 16 recipients.... But I’ve been told to send it to the 21 people in transport, the 11 in the warehouse, 3 in HR, 5 in the inventory team and maybe the fûcking cleaners.

So instead of 16... it’s going to about 40.... so you are clogging up the inbox of about 24 people, who haven’t asked for the report, don’t need the report, don’t want the fûcking thing but somehow your ego gets a boost by demanding that your employees sent the fûcking thing to everyone...

salonfire wrote: »

It's clear you have an absolute disdain for your employer, cannot see past the end of your nose and will not step outside the scope of your role. Everything else with you is "not my job", "not my problem", "I don't care".

Thankfully not all employees are like you. Most take an interest in the business they work in want to have a quick glance of these reports, see if sales are up or down even if not working in the sales department; see what the expenses are, if they are going up or down; who our new customers are, etc

If you cannot mange your mailbox to setup simple rules to filter out these regular reports, that's on you. Not anyone else.

The reports I received and sent were nothing to do with sales or any easily interpretable raw data... they were technical in nature and content, specific to the jobs and scope of responsibilities in my and those sending departments... then you’d have others sending shît to us about company vehicles, We take care of our own so why we need to know YOURS is in for a service ?

I can manage my inbox, but if people including manglement insist that we are getting xxx times the amount of mail we need, regardless of rules etc... if managers stop fingering each other and let people get on with communicating when needed, information that is needed, and dissuade idiots from bombarding the whole company with shît nobody needs or wants to know about, it’s better, it’s effective and efficient.

Always have gotten thousands of emails every day. Most I filtered out as they are automated notifications so I dump them into folders that I might take a weekly cursory scan of. But my big bugbear is that most emails should actually be treated like forums / threads on Boards. Lots of them are ++ group or person in a reply all and one-line replies and the majority are more discussion-based and should be that and not an email chain.

I sent up a auto rule folder called “internal” for all in house emails from people in my organisation, but not on my team. 90% of these emails are nonsense and by ignoring them, it forces these people to figure out the “problem” themselves. I don’t have time to be doing the thinking for other people.

For my boss, my direct reports and important customers, I’ll deal with those emails right away. Often by phoning and talking to them about the issue.

This works most of the time, but, nothing drives me mental as much as when I call someone, have a good conversation, and they ask at the end of the call for a quick “email” summarising the discussion. Argh.

We use Yammer instead of company-wide emails, and it’s working well. We barely even use email aliases, which I found weird when I started. Emailed announcements are used very sparingly.

Moved to Teams earlier this year, but sometimes I find people still need to be chased by email, because they’re not really used to following up on their tagged actions in Teams.

zerosugarbuzz wrote: »

Disagree completely. If people can’t have a conversation directly with someone then in my experience they lack communication skills. Admittedly this is becoming more common, doesn’t bode well. Have to add that often the question asked in the email makes no sense and the only way to avoid endless emails back and forth is to pick up the phone and ask the question.

If I'm looking for clarification on something that doesn't make sense in an email, I agree that a phonecall will resolve the issue much faster. However, I would always have a follow up email confirming what is to be done. Only because dealing with 3rd party clients and lord knows that 6 months later they will have no memory of that phonecall and what they agreed to. I'd do it for internal stuff as well if I disagree with the outcome of the call so that when it inevitably blows up in our faces and I can show that the boss agreed to whatever it was