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I am one of the most senior members of the team I am in. I receive around 50 to 70 mails per day (on a slow day). Most of them corporate noise from the mother

I am one of the most senior members of the team I am in. I receive around 50 to 70 mails per day (on a slow day). Most of them corporate noise from the mother ship. I still need to at least skim them as sometimes parts or single mails are relevant. Also there is a barrage of mails from the different projects I am onboarded onto as an expert for specific topics. So I need to take a close look at these and see if there are action items for me included. Then the regular mails from within the team I need to skim if anything is expected of me. On top of that there is Slack and MS Teams. And a few different Jira Instances I need to stay on top of. Over the last 16 months I have seen my team in person exactly once for an afternoon at a working offsite. When Corona started I did a daily stand-up post in our team channel in Slack. I stopped a few weeks ago as except for one colleague nobody had participated for over a year. So why add to the noise for them I asked myself. How would you expect me to read additional prose about what my colleagues have done. I just wouldn't get enough out of it. Because the things I would profit from in terms of synergies would be nitty-gritty technical details that would be omitted in a weekly summary. It would just be additional noise to me. If I have a question I ask in Slack and receive great substantial replies within very short time. If I can contribute I answer questions in Slack. Else I do my work and try to ignore as much of the corporate noise as possible. At least it is email noise. Not open space office noise. The latter is harder to ignore.

jordanbeiber 5y ago
Seems like your place of employment have a bunch of cultural and work process issues to sort out, to be honest. The diary entries are supposed to replace other forms of communication - not be an addition. My place of work strive for autonomous teams within specific business domains. You describe yourself as kind of a bottleneck, as things are expected from you in various projects, via email no less. We’re facing completely different work environments, and as such you see a daily or weekly log as an additional burden. I see it as replacing tones of emails and meetings. Again - it’s not required here, but as people have noticed the use and asynchronous discussions arising from these log entries, it’s taken a hold. I do them myself as a manager, as my team deserves to know what I’m up to.
- sdoering 5y ago
  > Seems like your place of employment have a bunch of cultural and work process issues to sort out, to be honest. The place and direct team not - the corporate mothership probably. It would be easy if I could at least filter out (internal) spam via sender addresses, but the sender address is a central one for ham as well as spam. > You describe yourself as kind of a bottleneck, as things are expected from you in various projects, via email no less. I am in part a bottle neck - in part just the consultant that is being onboarded into projects for specific questions, but as the probability is high that in the future there will be additional requests in my specific domains I am not rolled off these projects and therefore receive all client/project based "global" communication - even if my contribution is one hour every half a year. So yeah. This is an interesting way of putting strain on my inbox. > I see it as replacing tones of emails and meetings. I would love this. Would probably not work with my specific job - even if it could work for a lot of people in the place I work at. Being a function across different teams makes this unpractical for me - but not for others.
  - jordanbeiber 5y ago
    Interesting read - I love questioning “the process” and drilling down in ways of working. I am, almost an involuntary, manager of 6 different dev teams, and I often say that my aim to reduce the “management” part of my job to a shared duties whiteboard. Having this as an utopian goal I really strive to remove anything that will hinder team autonomy. Transparency, communication and ownership is crucial to this mission. Always team, never individuals!

jordanbeiber 5y ago

Seems like your place of employment have a bunch of cultural and work process issues to sort out, to be honest. The diary entries are supposed to replace other forms of communication - not be an addition. My place of work strive for autonomous teams within specific business domains. You describe yourself as kind of a bottleneck, as things are expected from you in various projects, via email no less. We’re facing completely different work environments, and as such you see a daily or weekly log as an additional burden. I see it as replacing tones of emails and meetings. Again - it’s not required here, but as people have noticed the use and asynchronous discussions arising from these log entries, it’s taken a hold. I do them myself as a manager, as my team deserves to know what I’m up to.

sdoering 5y ago
> Seems like your place of employment have a bunch of cultural and work process issues to sort out, to be honest. The place and direct team not - the corporate mothership probably. It would be easy if I could at least filter out (internal) spam via sender addresses, but the sender address is a central one for ham as well as spam. > You describe yourself as kind of a bottleneck, as things are expected from you in various projects, via email no less. I am in part a bottle neck - in part just the consultant that is being onboarded into projects for specific questions, but as the probability is high that in the future there will be additional requests in my specific domains I am not rolled off these projects and therefore receive all client/project based "global" communication - even if my contribution is one hour every half a year. So yeah. This is an interesting way of putting strain on my inbox. > I see it as replacing tones of emails and meetings. I would love this. Would probably not work with my specific job - even if it could work for a lot of people in the place I work at. Being a function across different teams makes this unpractical for me - but not for others.
- jordanbeiber 5y ago
  Interesting read - I love questioning “the process” and drilling down in ways of working. I am, almost an involuntary, manager of 6 different dev teams, and I often say that my aim to reduce the “management” part of my job to a shared duties whiteboard. Having this as an utopian goal I really strive to remove anything that will hinder team autonomy. Transparency, communication and ownership is crucial to this mission. Always team, never individuals!