Who doesn’t have personal e-mail? If you are on enough lists and or subscribe to enough services, you probably get a lot of e-mails. And if you are working most of the day, and don’t have access to your personal account, they can build up rather quickly and easily.
But what happens when your work revolves around e-mail? Communicating with coworkers – be they local, across the country, or even around the globe – to pass information about, share ideas, and, sometimes, get something in writing that can be saved and referenced some time in the future.
Take a week vacation and, voila, you have a few hundred or even a thousand e-mails to catch up on when you get back.
Most corporate systems have the ability to chime when an e-mail is received. I’ve been on conference calls with someone talking that sounds something like “So after we make the <bling> arrangements with the line of business, and they <bling> sign off on the requirements, we can distribute <bling> them to technology to <bling> start working on the deliverable. <bling>” It is true that Skype – the tool we use for internal Instant Messaging – makes similar notification sounds and someone could be having a chat, but who knows. There’s really no way to know if it was the actual person talking whose machine was making the noise. Yes, the conference call tools usually show who is speaking or what phone line the noise is coming from, but if someone is talking continuously, the system might not be able to / usually can’t keep up with switching between the two.
I arrive in the morning and there are usually a half dozen or more e-mails that were sent overnight, either from “Corporate”, management, a coworker that was working late or was on the opposite side of the country (so it was end of the day for them but late for me), or some other thing.
It isn’t that there are e-mails. It’s that sometime there are just… so…. many… of… them. I find that when I read, and concentrate on reading, my ears turn off. So I can’t really effectively listen to a conference call AND read a lot of e-mails.
In any Microsoft product, Ctrl+A is Select All. In Outlook, the platform that we have, Ctrl+Q marks an e-mail as read. Before being out of the office for the long year end holiday a couple years ago, I was cleaning up my Inbox. I was reading threads (a few e-mails between numerous participants on the same topic, having a conversation), individual e-mails, announcements, etc. If they were sequential with the same subject, I would Ctrl+Q the e-mail, then Shift-Delete them which permanently gets rid of them, doesn’t just move it to the Trash folder. There’s a confirmation about this too, but when doing this by the hundreds, clicking “OK” or just pressing the space bar since “OK” is already selected, is pretty much just reflex. This day, I thought I hit Ctrl+Q, but actually hit Ctrl+A instead. But without really paying attention to it, just hit Ctrl+Q right after that. OK, so I marked my entire Inbox as read. Not the end of the world, right? Right. But then I did Shift-Delete, space bar. Poof. The entire Inbox with thousands of e-mails was now empty. And because I purged and confirmed it, they were gone. That’s what I’m going to do on my last day.
Will I miss spending hours on end during the day reading and responding to e-mails? No. The answer is no. An emphatic, emphasized no. I’ll still have my personal e-mail do manage, but that volume is so much lower than what I have to deal with at the office.
