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PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com

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Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#21

Post by paul »

This is good. I've considered doing something like this and making it part of a daily process -- at the end of every day, any email that I haven't dealt with gets a NACK, and every day starts fresh.

Email is a disaster because it lacks flow control. In person, if too many people try to talk to me at once, they will have to wait their turn, and some will eventually give up or move a little faster when they see that others are waiting. Email lacks this dynamic -- everyone gets to talk at once. Disaster.

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#22

Post by csallen »

jwallaceparker wrote: post #18
csallen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole point of email is that I can send on my schedule, and you can read it on yours. A major cause of email overload is that senders don't respect the "you can read it on yours" part of that statement. Instead, they send emails requesting info that they need to act on within a specific window of time (usually hours or days). This implicitly assigns recipients a time limit, because responding too late would be…

>> This implicitly assigns recipients a time limit, because responding too late would be considered rude. If you're receiving 500+ emails a day that expect a prompt response, you don't stand a chance. This issue is addressed with a standard "Out of Office" response. The difference here is that Dave is making everyone who emailed him wait until some future date to re-send any non-urgent message. It significantly reduc…

>> It significantly reduces the workload for Dave but increases the workload for others.

Yes, but that's to be expected. If you're a very popular person, people should have to compete for your time. That's marginally inconvenient for them, yes, but it makes your life livable. It's like important CEOs having a secretary.

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#23

Post by Create »

Cory Doctorow also did this, and it worked fine from the other end. It was "deleting" in GOOG newspeak, I suppose it just sits there until read.

There was a detailed, longish autoreply explaining many things, but the gist of it was:

-8It would kind of spoil the break to come home from it with a mountain of email to answer, so I'm not accepting any email while I'm away. If you need to reach me, please re-send your message after the Nth.

If you need to speak to someone immediately, here are some handy contacts:

----------------------------

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#24

Post by vacri »

paul wrote: post #21

This is good. I've considered doing something like this and making it part of a daily process -- at the end of every day, any email that I haven't dealt with gets a NACK, and every day starts fresh. Email is a disaster because it lacks flow control. In person, if too many people try to talk to me at once, they will have to wait their turn, and some will eventually give up or move a little faster when they see that ot…

Huh? Email has that dynamic - You read one email at a time. Each email has to 'wait it's turn'. The only difference is the 'giving up' part: in voice, they decide to give up; in email, you decide it's a high noise mail and skip over it, 'giving up' for them.

If you're really getting that level of email chaff, cut it off at the source. Just throwing out half of it is the Wrong Thing To Do.

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#25

Post by arctangent »

My understanding is that this is fairly common amongst management in large organisations. (This understanding is based on my personal experience, so it may not be universal.)

I've spoken to several people who indicate their busyness by how many hundred emails they have to wade through when they return from holiday, and even met people who seem to accumulate this much email while actually doing their job.

Every so often these people will remark that they've deleted everything older than a certain number of days, on the understanding that if it was something really important then the person would get back to them again.

This is obviously very frustrating for the people sending the emails (and I'm sure I've fallen victim more than once) but I do see the merit in this approach: some people have so many demands made of them that a key part of their job is saying "no" to a lot of requests, and deleting emails is one way of doing that.

Deleting email is a very basic filter and it will generate a lot of false positives. But if something is really important then the person who needs something done will find another way to contact you, or they will contact someone else who can get things moving. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, as they say.

I don't think I'd even consider this approach with a personal email address though, because usually that mail is more important to my life that things sent to my work email address. (Restricting who knows your personal email address is another type of filter, I suppose.)

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#26

Post by zrgiu_ »

paul wrote: post #21

This is good. I've considered doing something like this and making it part of a daily process -- at the end of every day, any email that I haven't dealt with gets a NACK, and every day starts fresh. Email is a disaster because it lacks flow control. In person, if too many people try to talk to me at once, they will have to wait their turn, and some will eventually give up or move a little faster when they see that ot…

what are you talking about ? You read the emails whenever you want, and answer to them whenever you want. Too many people trying to talk to you at once is IM. Email is totally different.

If you want to compare it to something, compare it to regular (snail) mail. It's exactly the same thing.

The solution Dave chose (deleting emails while on holiday) is bad because messages get lost, and it's only caused by his lack of will to NOT check his email every 5 minutes. It completely defeats the purpose of mail.

Imagine disabling your regular mailbox while you go on vacation. What good would that do ?

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#27

Post by wedesoft »

My autoresponder just sends "I'll read your e-mail when I return". In general when reading e-mails takes too much time, I just read and respond to the rest on another day (except e-mails from friends). If you respond to your 200 e-mails immediately, you can be sure to have 100 follow-up e-mails the next day.

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#28

Post by jon_dahl »

zrgiu_ wrote: post #26
paul wrote: post #21

This is good. I've considered doing something like this and making it part of a daily process -- at the end of every day, any email that I haven't dealt with gets a NACK, and every day starts fresh. Email is a disaster because it lacks flow control. In person, if too many people try to talk to me at once, they will have to wait their turn, and some will eventually give up or move a little faster when they see that ot…

what are you talking about ? You read the emails whenever you want, and answer to them whenever you want. Too many people trying to talk to you at once is IM. Email is totally different. If you want to compare it to something, compare it to regular (snail) mail. It's exactly the same thing. The solution Dave chose (deleting emails while on holiday) is bad because messages get lost, and it's only caused by his lack of…

This only works if Dave's capacity for responding to email is greater than the amount of email he actually gets. What happens if Dave never wants to spend more than 16 hours per day on email (a reasonable assumption), and his total incoming email volume would require 20 hours per day to get through? Email would queue forever.

For many people, email is an absolute train wreck.

The solution Dave chose is bad because messages get lost

This is the point. Dave would say that his solution is good precisely because messages get lost. Dave is effectively increasing the barrier to receiving an email, and filtering out emails that don't reach that barrier, which is an economically reasonable approach to the problem. (This particular approach may not end up being the right one, but it is worth a try.)

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#29

Post by Luyt »

mkopinsky wrote: post #10
kcvv wrote: post #4

Seeing that this experiment was run in April 2011, I sure would like to see a follow up on how it turned out.

I just sent him an email alerting him to this thread and asking for the results. Let's see if he responds.

Did you specify 'URGENT' in the subject?
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