6 ms·

I've always been fascinated by people who seem to have this problem. I've heard multiple individuals describe responding to emails as an infinite attention suck

I've always been fascinated by people who seem to have this problem. I've heard multiple individuals describe responding to emails as an infinite attention suck sort of like doomscrolling. For me, email is 99% updates/promotions, 0.99% real humans that I can hit with a one liner, and 0.01% humans that really require a thoughtful response. Something must happen to these email people where they grow prominent enough and advertise their address enough that they get inundated with genuine email that is all from thoughtful humans? Feels like a problem I would enjoy having, at least for a while.

marginalia_nu 9mo ago
It generally tends to happen if you either do enough stuff publicly, or own a business. It's always nice when people reach out but it can also kinda tend to pile up and become a source of feelings of guilt about stuff you didn't reply to (and all of the sudden it's 16 months later and replying this late feels awkward).
1123581321 9mo ago
It greatly depends on your job, and it doesn’t have to be a glamorous job, just one where people request things of you or you of them. For example, a friend is a corporate buyer, somewhat low in his organization, and receives about 120 emails from humans each workday. (His strategy is to select all the emails he will handle that day, put them in a folder, and call himself done when that folder is empty. I.e., he almost never sends a same day response.)
kgwxd 9mo ago
my personal email is like yours. my work email is like the post.
stronglikedan 9mo ago
> For me, email is 99% updates/promotions, 0.99% real humans That sounds like personal email more than the work email discussed in the article. And if that's truly the split of your work email, seems like all you need is some server side inbox filters to manage that.
- hammock 9mo ago
  I wonder why spam in personal email is acceptable but spam in work email is not. Why can’t we do both?
  - hammock 9mo ago
    Why am I downvoted? Did people think I was suggesting spam in both?
    - harvey9 9mo ago
      Spam in personal email is not so much acceptable as unavoidable. I didn't vote either way.
      - hammock 9mo ago
        That’s the point I’m making though. Why is it unavoidable in personal but not unavoidable in work?
- makeitdouble 9mo ago
  Work email will be very different from job to job as well. Many orgs have basically declared bankruptcy on email and moved peofessional communication to other channels. For the last decade my work email has been basically notifications, with sometimes a single or two emails thoughtfully written by a human. And that's probably because anything people expect me to read will be either in Slack/whatever chat app, in a ticket/task, or straight in a calendar invite with an agenda to get up to speed. Funny thing is emails are now either only relevant for a few miliseconds where I only need to know what triggered it, or ultra important "we'll delete your account in 5 days" type that I absolutely don't want to miss. In a year I haven't got anything in between.
- phantasmish 9mo ago
  My work email is barely better. If it matters it reaches me in Teams (ugh, unfortunately). Email is full of spam, most of it company-internal (no I don’t give a shit about yet another “newsletter” that you probably had an LLM write anyway, because why wouldn’t you, because it’s fake work anyway)
bachmeier 9mo ago
I can give you an idea of why it's so terrible. I'm a professor that teaches multiple classes, I run our department's grad programs, I do various kinds of service activities within the university, I'm the editor of a journal, I collaborate on research with others, and I get media inquiries from time to time. That's the professional side. I have a family, a house, and just lots of other things that require email correspondence. It's not that the volume of messages needing a reply is so large (though sometimes that's an issue too) but rather the time and energy required is so large. Most things don't allow for a quick one-liner off the top of your head and then going back to work. In some cases, you have to do research and make sure stuff is followed up. My situation is by no means unique. Be thankful if you don't have to deal with it, because a lot of us do, and it's not by choice.
- ptero 9mo ago
  What you describe is a job that requires a lot of thoughtful, or at least meaningful, answers to a lot of people. If each answer leads to a context switch, this lands hard on any other work you do. On the comms side, this may well be a full time job; or more. But the problem has nothing to do with email. The problem is with combining what sounds like a full time management job with a full time teaching job. In fact email makes it possible to batch those requests instead of always being interrupted at an external schedule. And sorry -- I am not trying to tell you how to live your life, what comes next is just an engineering observation. But if one is overloaded the solution is almost always to ... reduce load. Transfer some duties and/or delegate more tasks and/or hire someone to help, etc. This is usually not easy, but IME most folks under overload who say they cannot reduce it either (1) did not try to reduce it in earnest or (2) are micromanagers who are willing to delegate only partway while maintaining the role in final decisions. My 2c.
  - nradov 9mo ago
    You're not wrong, but university professors don't necessarily have the authority or budget to hire assistants. And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors and omissions with serious consequences.
andy99 9mo ago
I’m with you, I’ve had a range of professional jobs, but rarely much meaningful correspondence via email. There are definitely emails that might announce some deadline or deliverable, but the “email” part of the work might be adding a calendar reminder or something, not responding to it. If feels like (I’m sure people will disagree) email would be more of a time sink for people who have a secretarial or personal assistant role, where they are being asked to do lots of little things (get me time with your boss this week type stuff). For a developer, whether IC or manager, most coordination would take place through other channels, and not be a material part of the work.
iberator 9mo ago
You nailed it: < FOR ME >
tra3 9mo ago
Substitute Slack for Email?
aworks 9mo ago
I'm a retired software manager. Email was inherent to the job as the primary way to communicate with people in far-flung countries. I'm guessing I spent 20% of my time in my inbox. Unfortunately, it wasn't in consecutive, large blocks but minutes of time interspersed with meetings, reading, etc. I tried and failed to read email only in larger sessions (although I did sit next to a manager on a plane once who plowed through their email in a single 3-hour session). When I retired, it took me several years to refine my email use. I finally figured out Google inbox with Primary, Update, etc. tabs were my friend. I had to give up the habit of treating each email with intent. Maybe 1% require a thoughtful response, 10% are worth reading and the rest can be ignored. That was not true for work email, though.
- xp84 9mo ago
  I’m a software manager at present - honestly I just ignore email. I do get some emails from customers, but they’re supposed to be communicating through proper channels so their customer success managers need to at minimum be on cc. So if anything is important people can Slack me (including to say “check your email for…”), and if there’s an action needed, I’ll click the little bookmark to add the message to the “Later” section till the issue has been addressed. I won’t in any way claim that I’m well organized, but I am proud that I don’t need to spend more than 20 minutes a week on email, because I hate email.
  - king_phil 9mo ago
    You basically reinvented e-mail in slack
    - xp84 9mo ago
      Slack doesn’t have spam coming from outside my company, and any “apps” that “helpfully” bother me can be silenced easily. Contrast this with email where the inbox fills with useless nonsense constantly. “An unrecognized device signed into…” “Upcoming birthdays on your team” (not making this up - Lattice sent this today) Even slack sends me email spam to tell me about messages that are waiting for me in slack. LOL.
muzani 9mo ago
My problem isn't with email or Slack. It's with WhatsApp and Telegram. It's the official channel for many things now, except it's not one channel, it's 50 or so. Wedding invites, family dinner invites, everything goes into there. They look no different to the overembellished spam about how (insert race) puts AIDS blood in our butter. REALLY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS regarding my daughters' exams and schooling etc are in Telegram as well, sometimes WhatsApp. Some schools are well aware of the problem and have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an app that isn't even an app, so now we have to head into yet another app-site to pick up the kids and get updates on schooling. The good thing about Discord at least is I can be sure to ignore 100% of it and opt in any time I like. The thing about emails is if I get too much spam from someone, I can unsubscribe. Same with social media. But I can't just block the gullible spammer uncle.
- pavel_lishin 9mo ago
  > Some schools are well aware of the problem and have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an app that isn't even an app, so now we have to head into yet another app-site to pick up the kids and get updates on schooling. Our local school seems to switch apps every year, steadily getting worse with each update until this year when they switched to something that's the least-bad of the lot. Every time, I start thinking to myself: maybe I can just fucking write an app for them to use that wouldn't be a usability nightmare. But then I come to my senses, and realize that I absolutely don't want to maintain an app for a single customer, set up email, sms, etc., store data safely in compliance with the various regulations. So I just go back to grumbling.
- muzani 9mo ago
  For a moment I think, maybe I'm exaggerating. So I open up Telegram. I wish HN allowed me to drop images, but basically, there's this "NEW SCHOOL TRANSITION" channel for my daughter who's switching schools. 95% of the channel is just user join spam. Yesterday someone dropped several PDFs. The title of these files is something like OZ36824106181121.pdf Wtf is this file? I open it and it's a list of textbooks to buy. The school shop is open 29 Dec - 5 Jan, except in weekends. But some groups are to buy these books after 20 Jan. Am I in that group? There is no CTA - do I need to buy this and when? We have a textbook borrowing scheme. Does the new school not do textbook borrowing? This is not my only child. This is how DBTC gets me.
marcuskaz 9mo ago
Do you have a school age child? My inbox is flooded with school updates, fund raisers, random questions, and is double when my two kids aren't at the same school.

marginalia_nu 9mo ago

It generally tends to happen if you either do enough stuff publicly, or own a business. It's always nice when people reach out but it can also kinda tend to pile up and become a source of feelings of guilt about stuff you didn't reply to (and all of the sudden it's 16 months later and replying this late feels awkward).

1123581321 9mo ago

It greatly depends on your job, and it doesn’t have to be a glamorous job, just one where people request things of you or you of them. For example, a friend is a corporate buyer, somewhat low in his organization, and receives about 120 emails from humans each workday. (His strategy is to select all the emails he will handle that day, put them in a folder, and call himself done when that folder is empty. I.e., he almost never sends a same day response.)

kgwxd 9mo ago

my personal email is like yours. my work email is like the post.

stronglikedan 9mo ago

> For me, email is 99% updates/promotions, 0.99% real humans That sounds like personal email more than the work email discussed in the article. And if that's truly the split of your work email, seems like all you need is some server side inbox filters to manage that.

hammock 9mo ago
I wonder why spam in personal email is acceptable but spam in work email is not. Why can’t we do both?
- hammock 9mo ago
  Why am I downvoted? Did people think I was suggesting spam in both?
  - harvey9 9mo ago
    Spam in personal email is not so much acceptable as unavoidable. I didn't vote either way.
    - hammock 9mo ago
      That’s the point I’m making though. Why is it unavoidable in personal but not unavoidable in work?
makeitdouble 9mo ago
Work email will be very different from job to job as well. Many orgs have basically declared bankruptcy on email and moved peofessional communication to other channels. For the last decade my work email has been basically notifications, with sometimes a single or two emails thoughtfully written by a human. And that's probably because anything people expect me to read will be either in Slack/whatever chat app, in a ticket/task, or straight in a calendar invite with an agenda to get up to speed. Funny thing is emails are now either only relevant for a few miliseconds where I only need to know what triggered it, or ultra important "we'll delete your account in 5 days" type that I absolutely don't want to miss. In a year I haven't got anything in between.
phantasmish 9mo ago
My work email is barely better. If it matters it reaches me in Teams (ugh, unfortunately). Email is full of spam, most of it company-internal (no I don’t give a shit about yet another “newsletter” that you probably had an LLM write anyway, because why wouldn’t you, because it’s fake work anyway)

bachmeier 9mo ago

I can give you an idea of why it's so terrible. I'm a professor that teaches multiple classes, I run our department's grad programs, I do various kinds of service activities within the university, I'm the editor of a journal, I collaborate on research with others, and I get media inquiries from time to time. That's the professional side. I have a family, a house, and just lots of other things that require email correspondence. It's not that the volume of messages needing a reply is so large (though sometimes that's an issue too) but rather the time and energy required is so large. Most things don't allow for a quick one-liner off the top of your head and then going back to work. In some cases, you have to do research and make sure stuff is followed up. My situation is by no means unique. Be thankful if you don't have to deal with it, because a lot of us do, and it's not by choice.

ptero 9mo ago
What you describe is a job that requires a lot of thoughtful, or at least meaningful, answers to a lot of people. If each answer leads to a context switch, this lands hard on any other work you do. On the comms side, this may well be a full time job; or more. But the problem has nothing to do with email. The problem is with combining what sounds like a full time management job with a full time teaching job. In fact email makes it possible to batch those requests instead of always being interrupted at an external schedule. And sorry -- I am not trying to tell you how to live your life, what comes next is just an engineering observation. But if one is overloaded the solution is almost always to ... reduce load. Transfer some duties and/or delegate more tasks and/or hire someone to help, etc. This is usually not easy, but IME most folks under overload who say they cannot reduce it either (1) did not try to reduce it in earnest or (2) are micromanagers who are willing to delegate only partway while maintaining the role in final decisions. My 2c.
- nradov 9mo ago
  You're not wrong, but university professors don't necessarily have the authority or budget to hire assistants. And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors and omissions with serious consequences.

andy99 9mo ago

I’m with you, I’ve had a range of professional jobs, but rarely much meaningful correspondence via email. There are definitely emails that might announce some deadline or deliverable, but the “email” part of the work might be adding a calendar reminder or something, not responding to it. If feels like (I’m sure people will disagree) email would be more of a time sink for people who have a secretarial or personal assistant role, where they are being asked to do lots of little things (get me time with your boss this week type stuff). For a developer, whether IC or manager, most coordination would take place through other channels, and not be a material part of the work.

iberator 9mo ago

You nailed it: < FOR ME >

tra3 9mo ago

Substitute Slack for Email?

aworks 9mo ago

I'm a retired software manager. Email was inherent to the job as the primary way to communicate with people in far-flung countries. I'm guessing I spent 20% of my time in my inbox. Unfortunately, it wasn't in consecutive, large blocks but minutes of time interspersed with meetings, reading, etc. I tried and failed to read email only in larger sessions (although I did sit next to a manager on a plane once who plowed through their email in a single 3-hour session). When I retired, it took me several years to refine my email use. I finally figured out Google inbox with Primary, Update, etc. tabs were my friend. I had to give up the habit of treating each email with intent. Maybe 1% require a thoughtful response, 10% are worth reading and the rest can be ignored. That was not true for work email, though.

xp84 9mo ago
I’m a software manager at present - honestly I just ignore email. I do get some emails from customers, but they’re supposed to be communicating through proper channels so their customer success managers need to at minimum be on cc. So if anything is important people can Slack me (including to say “check your email for…”), and if there’s an action needed, I’ll click the little bookmark to add the message to the “Later” section till the issue has been addressed. I won’t in any way claim that I’m well organized, but I am proud that I don’t need to spend more than 20 minutes a week on email, because I hate email.
- king_phil 9mo ago
  You basically reinvented e-mail in slack
  - xp84 9mo ago
    Slack doesn’t have spam coming from outside my company, and any “apps” that “helpfully” bother me can be silenced easily. Contrast this with email where the inbox fills with useless nonsense constantly. “An unrecognized device signed into…” “Upcoming birthdays on your team” (not making this up - Lattice sent this today) Even slack sends me email spam to tell me about messages that are waiting for me in slack. LOL.

muzani 9mo ago

My problem isn't with email or Slack. It's with WhatsApp and Telegram. It's the official channel for many things now, except it's not one channel, it's 50 or so. Wedding invites, family dinner invites, everything goes into there. They look no different to the overembellished spam about how (insert race) puts AIDS blood in our butter. REALLY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS regarding my daughters' exams and schooling etc are in Telegram as well, sometimes WhatsApp. Some schools are well aware of the problem and have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an app that isn't even an app, so now we have to head into yet another app-site to pick up the kids and get updates on schooling. The good thing about Discord at least is I can be sure to ignore 100% of it and opt in any time I like. The thing about emails is if I get too much spam from someone, I can unsubscribe. Same with social media. But I can't just block the gullible spammer uncle.

pavel_lishin 9mo ago
> Some schools are well aware of the problem and have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an app that isn't even an app, so now we have to head into yet another app-site to pick up the kids and get updates on schooling. Our local school seems to switch apps every year, steadily getting worse with each update until this year when they switched to something that's the least-bad of the lot. Every time, I start thinking to myself: maybe I can just fucking write an app for them to use that wouldn't be a usability nightmare. But then I come to my senses, and realize that I absolutely don't want to maintain an app for a single customer, set up email, sms, etc., store data safely in compliance with the various regulations. So I just go back to grumbling.
muzani 9mo ago
For a moment I think, maybe I'm exaggerating. So I open up Telegram. I wish HN allowed me to drop images, but basically, there's this "NEW SCHOOL TRANSITION" channel for my daughter who's switching schools. 95% of the channel is just user join spam. Yesterday someone dropped several PDFs. The title of these files is something like OZ36824106181121.pdf Wtf is this file? I open it and it's a list of textbooks to buy. The school shop is open 29 Dec - 5 Jan, except in weekends. But some groups are to buy these books after 20 Jan. Am I in that group? There is no CTA - do I need to buy this and when? We have a textbook borrowing scheme. Does the new school not do textbook borrowing? This is not my only child. This is how DBTC gets me.

marcuskaz 9mo ago

Do you have a school age child? My inbox is flooded with school updates, fund raisers, random questions, and is double when my two kids aren't at the same school.