I figure about 95% of email is worthless. I get copied on so many emails that there is absolutely no reason for me to see.
I submit a change ticket and I get 3 emails back telling me I submitted a change record.
Every once in a while I just do a bunch of mass deletes
My current email
View attachment 96723
Too many emails, too many conference calls, no communication
Are you me?
I just finished doing a mass delete of ~12,000+ emails from the past 5 months. So, about 80 per day. These would be only the incoming items.
It looks like I sent 480 emails in that time. 3 or 4 messages per day.
Let's check your 95% estimate to my numbers -
If 100% of the emails I sent have worth and they are replying to or getting a reply from an email that also has worth that means that less than 1,000 of my ~12,500 messages are not worthless.
So, 92% of my email in that assessment is worthless. I try really hard to not be the guy that just CC's someone new in to an email chain and says "Thoughts?", but I know I sent some dumb emails to threads where it was just a picture of George Costanza.
Yeah, 95% of email being worthless sounds about right.
The thing that sucks about email is that the more you send and the faster you respond the more you'll receive back.
For this reason I would warn anyone about setting up the expectations to their clients, managers, or colleagues that they respond to email on the weekend. Most people in this thread have said they have some sort of rule or intentionality to if they are checking their email on the weekend. Some have set expectations with their work that they will not be checking email and to call or text if they are truly needed.
But that's just surface level problems. Go deeper on email communication in general and you'll see that each email message sent that you are expecting a response on is an open loop in your brain that is going to push you to check your email. And check it again. And again. It only takes a few seconds to pause what you're doing and look in your inbox, right? Of course not. This is called a context shift and these are invitations to completely change what you are thinking about which disrupts focus and ability to actually get meaningful work done. There have been several studies of the impact of this in minutes it takes to get back on track to a task after being interrupted. It's usually about 15 minutes. And there are studies too that show that not only does it take longer to do that task that is interrupted, but the quality of work suffers as well.
Human brains are not built for multitasking. There are people that say that they can multitask and are great at it, but they are straight up lying to themselves. Ask them to write down their current address, phone number, and emergency contact name & number while saying out loud what they last ate for a meal, what time they went to bed last night, and what color shoes they are wearing. These are all things an average, young child can do one at a time, but truly multitasking them is impossible.
When expected to be monitored throughout the entire working day, email fragments your attention, causing your quality of work to drop, and makes you tired and miserable.
Oh, and of course it's not just email. It's really any type of communication that is unscheduled such as instant messages, texting, or social media. Yikes, there are some cans of worms there to be left alone.
I'll close out my TEDx with a revised quote from Peter Gibbons who used to work at Initech.
Human beings were not meant to sit at home staring at screens all day, sending out and reading useless emails sent from eight different bosses droning on about about mission statements.
Proving to me that most email is a worthless waste of time. Since then I look at email when I have time and if it is really important, someone will follow up if you haven't responded.
