Live data from Hacker News

Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

glyph.twistedmatrix.com

1–10 of 120 posts

Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#2
Completely agree.

We use Skype chat at my company for internal communications and it is far more distracting than email.

Some people seem to 'over-communicate' when using real-time chat, meaning that my Skype is flashing non-stop. Yes, I can turn off the notifications but then, what's the point of using real-time chat versus email?

Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#4
What I despise most the is the desk drop in, especially for things that could be easily emailed. Sometimes even interrupting me to alert me in person that you've sent me an email.

However I've been told by a manager to use the desk drop in more, to get more visibility and make it look like I'm engaging with the team to outside observers

Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#5
post #4

What I despise most the is the desk drop in, especially for things that could be easily emailed. Sometimes even interrupting me to alert me in person that you've sent me an email. However I've been told by a manager to use the desk drop in more, to get more visibility and make it look like I'm engaging with the team to outside observers

I recently had a manager say the same thing to me about Slack.

The founders were apparently trolling the tech channels and my name didn't come up enough. Mostly because I was busy working and not incessantly spamming giphy nonsense.

Needless to say I quit.

Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#6
I never mark email as read, nor do I move it out of my inbox. I have something like 800k unread emails in my inbox.

However, I don't need to 'declare email bankruptcy' nor do I need to clear out my inbox.. I just don't pay any attention to the read or unread status. My inbox IS my archive.

My system is this:

When I check my email, I make sure I mark the most recent email as read. Then, I look back until I find the next email marked as read. The emails between those two are the ones that are unseen.

I do a quick glance at the emails in between. If they look important, I read them. If they are important but I don't want to deal with it now, I 'star' it in gmail. If it isn't important, I just don't do anything.

I don't quite get the need to have an empty inbox or to read every email.

Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#8
What do people think about using email as an alternative to social networks - i.e. creating lists of email addresses (groups), and sending out photos, jokes, opinions, etc. to those groups (e.g. an "All" group to send life updates, a "Cool" group that can take any joke, etc.)?

Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#9
I don't understand people complaining with lots of unread emails.. If you didn't read an email from X days ago or older, you won't ever do it. Just mark as read all [unread] mail from X days ago till the beginning of Time, and you are set to go.

Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#10

What do people think about using email as an alternative to social networks - i.e. creating lists of email addresses (groups), and sending out photos, jokes, opinions, etc. to those groups (e.g. an "All" group to send life updates, a "Cool" group that can take any joke, etc.)?

This is by and large how I operate. I don't do Facebook. I use Slack at work, because I have to, but I hate RTC in general.

I personally love email. It fits how I do things. I can take the time to compose carefully, it supports more than a sentence or two but is also fine for "me too!" comments, it is a fine quick-n-dirty file transfer tool (so long as you're not mailing a kernel source tarball or pile of RAW images), and, I think most importantly, sets expectations properly.

Post reply on HN