I was off work last week for 4 days. My Mother-in-law died. She was 86 and her quality of life was non-existent for the last few years. Anyway, that’s not my complaint.
I’m in at work today trying to get caught up. I had 39 new work-related emails for Monday through Wednesday, some of which I got to on Thursday. And now I have 23 new emails for Friday alone.
Some of these are no-brainers and will require about one minute of my time, but others are genuine emails to which I must respond. Assuming an average of 5 minutes per email that means I have about 5 hours of work ahead of me just to catch up. Maybe it’ll be more like 10 minutes per email though, which means 10 hours of catch-up.
When I started working we had Vax Mail on dumb terminals, if anyone remembers that. I’d be lucky to get 2 per day. How did we ever get to this level? What the hell did people do 30 years ago without email, voice mail, cell phones, Blackberries, etc. Seems to me we were just as productive back then!
OK. I’m done whining and need to get back to my emails.
Are you kidding me? In my inbox, right now, I have at least 1500 e-mails. That’s about a week’s worth. About 10 of them are spam that the company will eventually figure out how to block. The rest are legit, though not all apply to me. I still have to filter through them all to find the 300 or so that I need to respond to each week.
If I spent 5 minutes on each of those 300, I’d never get anything done.
I’m gobsmacked! You get 1,500 emails per week and need to respond to 300 of them! :dubious:
I love e-mail. There are so many things that can be done faster via e-mail than a phone call.
Yes, but there are also a million things that I don’t need to get via email.
And with email, lets not forget ‘tone’. You know, how the slightest awkwardly typed phrase can be misread as a snarky interdepartmental (emphasis on ‘mental’) insult, resulting in an escalation of cc flame war-ing with half of your chain of command in unwanted spectator seats. :smack: :smack: :smack:
And yet just One phone call pours water over it all so that work can move onward…
Verbal- “No Bob, I’m not trying to show you up or make brownie points. Anyone can make a mistake; I make lots of them. I’m only trying to find out if what happened was a one-time typo or if there was a process mistake, meaning that there could be more out there, which we can’t see yet, waiting to bite us when we least expect it.
If the numbers are wrong, we all suffer, and nobody needs that…”