Ignoring emails signals that you're bad at your job....

I have this discussion with people about email all the time. People say email is a scourge on society. Pick up the phone. Quit relying on email. 

Well.....I’m going out on a limb to say that’s ridiculous. I am sure people will tell me am wrong on this topic but I agree with this INC article (https://www.inc.com/betsy-mikel/this-increasingly-common-email-habit-is-a-telltale-sign-of-an-ineffective-manager.html) 100%!! Should people be more responsible with email? Yes. However email naysayers want us to believe there is some magical way to keep your inbox completely clean even when you get 100 emails a day. People are so proud when saying “my inbox is empty”. I love the people that say “I delete everything I don’t need! Which is most everything I get?” Really? How about a damn spam filter? Sitting there trying to just delete everything from your inbox that's NOT pertinent doesn't that take just as long as responding to the pertinent emails versus ignoring them. I can look in my inbox and tell you that everything that’s been opened has already been responded to at least initially. I’d rather spend time later cleaning up. 

I’ve been in technology for 29 years going back to old Microsoft mail. I had one of the first blackberry click wheel pagers with my emails forwarded to it. That was the greatest thing in the world when it first came out because for those 29 years I have been one of those people that reply in practically real-time. If you send me an email and I don’t have the answer right away or at least within the hour call me and make sure I am OK. If it’s going to take some time to craft an answer or if I need to do some research I’ll at least let you know “hey, I’m working on it. I’ll get back to you”. How hard is that? I am guessing most emails take 1-3 Minutes to compose so it hardly seems like a stretch to me. Longer ones I get to when I am standing in line or back in the office. 

Hey look our companies give us devices so your email is literally in your hand. Why should there be any “substantial delay when you are on travel” unless there is a substantial time zone difference. I get that I am sometimes in 9+ hour time zone differential. That is what 5% of the entire workforce. I also sleep only 3-5 hours most nights so there still isn’t much of a delay. Hell airplanes have WiFi 80% of the time anymore. Well I am probably working on my laptop. Oh wait you are working? Isn’t email work? 

People are relatively awful at responding to email because they’ve convinced themselves it is some kind a burden but unfortunately it’s how we do business. It’s our paper trail. It’s our way of moving the ball forward on a project. It’s our next step. It’s our archive. It is a way to find information and a way of sharing things. It’s a way of keeping information flowing. 

I am implementing some new simple techniques in my email etiquette. I’ll start adding REPLY REQUESTED, PLEASE READ, ACTION REQUIRED, REPLY BY, and things like that in the subject line when I need a result. 

Now if we can just teach people to BCC or stop replying all!!!

 https://www.inc.com/betsy-mikel/this-increasingly-common-email-habit-is-a-telltale-sign-of-an-ineffective-manager.html