How to be less responsive in communications
January 21, 2021 5:12 AM Subscribe
How do I stop replying to things in real time?
Background info: My work situation has always been problematic but has become very much more so since the pandemic and working from home. Our management is highly anxious, micro-manage-y, and glued to their emails constantly. If you don't do a thing immediately you can be expected to be bombarded by emails from management going: "Hey unicorn chaser, when are you going to do that thing??????"
I have been seeking a new job for a year, but with the pandemic impacting my sector badly, I haven't secured anything new yet.
So having set the scene... my issue is that I feel pressure to reply to emails immediately. Mostly work. This is for several reasons:
1. If I do it now, it's done. A thing ticked off the very long to-do list.
2. I've tried allocating periods of time to attending to emails and texts, but this tends to snowball because of point 1 below... People email/text me back in real-time and then it ends up taking up much more of my time than expected.
3. If I leave emails piled up then dealing with them in a big lump feels intimidating and can take a very long time. Because my workplace is extraordinarily email-happy, it becomes a huge task.
4. A lot of emails are time-sensitive.
5. A lot of emails are not time-sensitive, but management gets worked up about them. I try to keep them out of email loops as much as possible, but they ask to be CCed into everything "to manage their anxiety" (a direct quote)
6. I think there is a bit of a trust issue here, given the amount of micro-managing, double-checking and anxiety-management I am expected to do. I either don't feel trusted by management or they just do not trust me or any of their employees (my colleagues also feel bombarded by emails). So I feel like if I don't reply to emails immediately, my boss and their boss will assume I'm slacking off.
But replying super promptly leads to the following problems:
1. It's never 'one, and done'. See point 2 above. It frequently leads to people, e.g. my boss, emailing or texting me back in real-time to continue the conversation.
2. It leaves me feeling like I can never be fully present in any task because part of me needs to have a bit of attention on standby for replying to things.
(This bleeds over a little bit into personal communications as well. With one or two close friends, they are massive fans of synchronous texting, which means that sometimes I have to carefully time a text to them at a time I know they are busy or driving, otherwise they will reply immediately and expect a flurry of real-time back and forth texting, which I'm not against but I have to be in the mood for. That's not so much of an issue as work communications, though.)
So my question is how can I manage my emails efficiently and manage people's expectations of how soon I am going to reply, while not ending up with huge piles of unread emails, or missing time-sensitive emails, or sending my manager into a tailspin of anxiety and distrust? I don't like this job, but I need to keep it for now!
Please don't tell me to get another job. It's not a short term solution although it's the medium-term plan.
Background info: My work situation has always been problematic but has become very much more so since the pandemic and working from home. Our management is highly anxious, micro-manage-y, and glued to their emails constantly. If you don't do a thing immediately you can be expected to be bombarded by emails from management going: "Hey unicorn chaser, when are you going to do that thing??????"
I have been seeking a new job for a year, but with the pandemic impacting my sector badly, I haven't secured anything new yet.
So having set the scene... my issue is that I feel pressure to reply to emails immediately. Mostly work. This is for several reasons:
1. If I do it now, it's done. A thing ticked off the very long to-do list.
2. I've tried allocating periods of time to attending to emails and texts, but this tends to snowball because of point 1 below... People email/text me back in real-time and then it ends up taking up much more of my time than expected.
3. If I leave emails piled up then dealing with them in a big lump feels intimidating and can take a very long time. Because my workplace is extraordinarily email-happy, it becomes a huge task.
4. A lot of emails are time-sensitive.
5. A lot of emails are not time-sensitive, but management gets worked up about them. I try to keep them out of email loops as much as possible, but they ask to be CCed into everything "to manage their anxiety" (a direct quote)
6. I think there is a bit of a trust issue here, given the amount of micro-managing, double-checking and anxiety-management I am expected to do. I either don't feel trusted by management or they just do not trust me or any of their employees (my colleagues also feel bombarded by emails). So I feel like if I don't reply to emails immediately, my boss and their boss will assume I'm slacking off.
But replying super promptly leads to the following problems:
1. It's never 'one, and done'. See point 2 above. It frequently leads to people, e.g. my boss, emailing or texting me back in real-time to continue the conversation.
2. It leaves me feeling like I can never be fully present in any task because part of me needs to have a bit of attention on standby for replying to things.
(This bleeds over a little bit into personal communications as well. With one or two close friends, they are massive fans of synchronous texting, which means that sometimes I have to carefully time a text to them at a time I know they are busy or driving, otherwise they will reply immediately and expect a flurry of real-time back and forth texting, which I'm not against but I have to be in the mood for. That's not so much of an issue as work communications, though.)
So my question is how can I manage my emails efficiently and manage people's expectations of how soon I am going to reply, while not ending up with huge piles of unread emails, or missing time-sensitive emails, or sending my manager into a tailspin of anxiety and distrust? I don't like this job, but I need to keep it for now!
Please don't tell me to get another job. It's not a short term solution although it's the medium-term plan.
When I want to get an email out of my inbox but for whatever reason I don't want to give the appearance of constantly dropping everything whenever an email comes in, I use the outlook function and/or the boomerang add-on for gmail to schedule my reply to go out at x time. This would solve issues 1, 3 and 4, and possibly 2 as well if you scheduled them to go out in a group and then blocked a half hour to deal with replies.
posted by geegollygosh at 5:23 AM on January 21, 2021 [10 favorites]
posted by geegollygosh at 5:23 AM on January 21, 2021 [10 favorites]
Seconding Boomerang. I don't even use it that often but knowing it's there helps the anxiety.
posted by Morpeth at 5:28 AM on January 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Morpeth at 5:28 AM on January 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
Definitely schedule some of these messages to be sent later. When I send to people that I know to be quick responders, I often delay sending by 15-30 minutes with the idea that they will be busy replying to someone else when my message goes out.
posted by mmascolino at 5:41 AM on January 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by mmascolino at 5:41 AM on January 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
Definitely schedule send. It's supported in Gmail and in Outlook.
Because I'm working from home while caring for a baby, I often do work in off-hours, but I don't want management to know I'm working at night (which would lead to the expectation that I could hold Zoom meetings at 9pm, etc). Schedule send fixes that. I work when it's convenient for me, and they get the emails at a more appropriate time. It's a blessing.
posted by epanalepsis at 6:52 AM on January 21, 2021 [4 favorites]
Because I'm working from home while caring for a baby, I often do work in off-hours, but I don't want management to know I'm working at night (which would lead to the expectation that I could hold Zoom meetings at 9pm, etc). Schedule send fixes that. I work when it's convenient for me, and they get the emails at a more appropriate time. It's a blessing.
posted by epanalepsis at 6:52 AM on January 21, 2021 [4 favorites]
A few things you could try:
1. If it seems like a back and forth conversation, talk on Slack instead of email (or pick up the phone)
2. If you know someone's going to bug you if you don't respond, send a quick reply saying that you got the message and you'll reply by x time (maybe add that you're working on y project).
3. Ask your boss if you can move to a system of checking emails 2x a day to be more productive, and send out auto-replies the rest of the time telling people to call you if it's an emergency.
4. Talk to your boss about ways that you think that projects could be managed differently so there isn't a constant stream of urgent emails (do you think it's possible there are alternatives? Is your team using any project management software so people can check the status of things whenever they want?)
posted by pinochiette at 6:58 AM on January 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
1. If it seems like a back and forth conversation, talk on Slack instead of email (or pick up the phone)
2. If you know someone's going to bug you if you don't respond, send a quick reply saying that you got the message and you'll reply by x time (maybe add that you're working on y project).
3. Ask your boss if you can move to a system of checking emails 2x a day to be more productive, and send out auto-replies the rest of the time telling people to call you if it's an emergency.
4. Talk to your boss about ways that you think that projects could be managed differently so there isn't a constant stream of urgent emails (do you think it's possible there are alternatives? Is your team using any project management software so people can check the status of things whenever they want?)
posted by pinochiette at 6:58 AM on January 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
A lot of these real-time conversations (assuming they're actually important) would take 3 to 10 times less time as a voice conversation. When you can sense a thread like that starting up, can you reply with "call me" and your number?
posted by heatherlogan at 6:59 AM on January 21, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by heatherlogan at 6:59 AM on January 21, 2021 [4 favorites]
Disclaimer: You don't specify what "time-sensitive" means. If your job actually depends on emails being replied to immediately my advice is less useful. That said...
Your problem isn't email, your problem is how you value yourself and how secure you are in your job.
You can't control other people's anxiety. If you block out a certain amount of time for email, as you mention in point 2 and as I would suggest, STOP at the end of that time. It doesn't matter if someone replied already. They can wait. Most white collar work is never as urgent as the person asking about it thinks it is. Most deadlines are arbitrary.
Will you actually be fired or disciplined if you don't respond immediately? I don't mean someone being annoyed in the moment, I mean actual real consequences? You are already looking for a new job so I assume slightly damaging your potential for long term advancement at this job isn't a big deal.
As others note in the thread, people will respond to you according to their expectations. You are enabling the micromanaging by responding to it. If you reliably get tasks done on time, but don't reply immediately to every thing, over time your colleagues will adjust to the boundaries you have set, in most cases without even noticing that they're doing it.
posted by Wretch729 at 7:18 AM on January 21, 2021 [12 favorites]
Your problem isn't email, your problem is how you value yourself and how secure you are in your job.
You can't control other people's anxiety. If you block out a certain amount of time for email, as you mention in point 2 and as I would suggest, STOP at the end of that time. It doesn't matter if someone replied already. They can wait. Most white collar work is never as urgent as the person asking about it thinks it is. Most deadlines are arbitrary.
Will you actually be fired or disciplined if you don't respond immediately? I don't mean someone being annoyed in the moment, I mean actual real consequences? You are already looking for a new job so I assume slightly damaging your potential for long term advancement at this job isn't a big deal.
As others note in the thread, people will respond to you according to their expectations. You are enabling the micromanaging by responding to it. If you reliably get tasks done on time, but don't reply immediately to every thing, over time your colleagues will adjust to the boundaries you have set, in most cases without even noticing that they're doing it.
posted by Wretch729 at 7:18 AM on January 21, 2021 [12 favorites]
I had a boss a couple of years ago who suggested the following email plan:
-Schedule an email period once an hour. Kind of like pomodoro - take like ten minutes at the top of every hour to look at the emails you've gotten since the last time you checked.
-File any emails that don't require a response away immediately.
-If it would take less than two minutes to reply, reply immediately.
-If it would take more than two minutes to reply, schedule a time on your calendar to answer it, then send a quick response saying "I'm looking into this and I have should have an answer for you by ___". Give yourself some cushion from the actual calendar appointment, though, in case something else comes up. So if you've got it on your calendar at 2:30 and you think it'll take around 15 minutes to answer, say you'll have an answer by 4. (Alternatively, you could just say "end of day", but I don't know if that would go over well with your correspondents.)
I observed it more in the breach, but it's a good system. My boss actually suggested closing Outlook except during designated email periods, but I couldn't bring myself to do that.
One thing I'd note is that email is a pretty lousy medium for time-sensitive communication. For things like "hey, did you see what so-and-so said?" or "will you have everything ready for the 3pm meeting?", it's a lot better to communicate via instant message, phone, or face to face. If there's any way you can work on changing that aspect of the culture, that would declutter your inbox a little and allow you to focus better on the emails that do actually need to be emails.
For your personal communications, though, you're the boss. Just don't text if it's not a good time. Your friends can expect whatever they like, but you're not under any responsibility to care about their expectations. If it becomes an issue, remind them of what you're dealing with at work, and tell them you'd appreciate not dealing with the same thing after work. Try to make less annoying friends.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:19 AM on January 21, 2021 [4 favorites]
-Schedule an email period once an hour. Kind of like pomodoro - take like ten minutes at the top of every hour to look at the emails you've gotten since the last time you checked.
-File any emails that don't require a response away immediately.
-If it would take less than two minutes to reply, reply immediately.
-If it would take more than two minutes to reply, schedule a time on your calendar to answer it, then send a quick response saying "I'm looking into this and I have should have an answer for you by ___". Give yourself some cushion from the actual calendar appointment, though, in case something else comes up. So if you've got it on your calendar at 2:30 and you think it'll take around 15 minutes to answer, say you'll have an answer by 4. (Alternatively, you could just say "end of day", but I don't know if that would go over well with your correspondents.)
I observed it more in the breach, but it's a good system. My boss actually suggested closing Outlook except during designated email periods, but I couldn't bring myself to do that.
One thing I'd note is that email is a pretty lousy medium for time-sensitive communication. For things like "hey, did you see what so-and-so said?" or "will you have everything ready for the 3pm meeting?", it's a lot better to communicate via instant message, phone, or face to face. If there's any way you can work on changing that aspect of the culture, that would declutter your inbox a little and allow you to focus better on the emails that do actually need to be emails.
For your personal communications, though, you're the boss. Just don't text if it's not a good time. Your friends can expect whatever they like, but you're not under any responsibility to care about their expectations. If it becomes an issue, remind them of what you're dealing with at work, and tell them you'd appreciate not dealing with the same thing after work. Try to make less annoying friends.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:19 AM on January 21, 2021 [4 favorites]
"4. A lot of emails are time-sensitive.
5. A lot of emails are not time-sensitive, but management gets worked up about them. "
Yes, backing up here what others have said above - email is not the appropriate communication choice for time-sensitive stuff.
With that in mind, how much do you feel like addressing this as part of your company culture? There's a spectrum I can imagine, at one end looking for personal solutions and at the other end trying to kick off a step change in behaviour with email.
If you feel like doing that, try this - arrange a workshop with your team, and plot out different methods of communication (email, phone, face-to-face, messenger/slack etc, snail mail, semaphore) on a graph, where one axis is formal/informal and the other is urgency of response. Get them to agree on where to place each of the methods on that graph. Then get them to talk about what stuff you might use each method for, based on that graph. Then agree some protocols for making this into your team culture if everyone agrees it's a good idea.
posted by greenish at 7:50 AM on January 21, 2021
5. A lot of emails are not time-sensitive, but management gets worked up about them. "
Yes, backing up here what others have said above - email is not the appropriate communication choice for time-sensitive stuff.
With that in mind, how much do you feel like addressing this as part of your company culture? There's a spectrum I can imagine, at one end looking for personal solutions and at the other end trying to kick off a step change in behaviour with email.
If you feel like doing that, try this - arrange a workshop with your team, and plot out different methods of communication (email, phone, face-to-face, messenger/slack etc, snail mail, semaphore) on a graph, where one axis is formal/informal and the other is urgency of response. Get them to agree on where to place each of the methods on that graph. Then get them to talk about what stuff you might use each method for, based on that graph. Then agree some protocols for making this into your team culture if everyone agrees it's a good idea.
posted by greenish at 7:50 AM on January 21, 2021
You have two problems here. The first (which you list in 1-3) are things you can control.
But 4, 5, 6 - you can't do anything about those! You even quote your boss in #5 providing a specific reason as to why your job requires immediate feedback (not a good reason, mind you, but its a reason).
I'd suggest a two step fix here. For 1-3, implement the simple solutions like *don't* respond to non time-sensitive emails immediately; practice rejecting that quick fix feeling of "getting things done". Set your inbox so emails from your boss go one place that you get to right away. Others go elsewhere, so you can glance and see if they are time-sensitive.
But there's no fix at all unless your boss and the wider company culture is amenable to it. If possible, you should spend some time outlining the problem specifically with your boss, in person and verbally: "its hard for me to get any substantive work done because I get a lot of emails and texts - including from you - that interrupt me. Can we implement [this solution] to make it easier for me?"
Remember, they might say no - they already gave you a goofy answer about "anxiety" (which is not generally in bounds of what a supervisee should be required to manage) so you may simply have to accept that this is the job. I know, it sucks, but sometimes recognizing the limitations of a position makes it easier to compartmentalize the stress of it, until you find another in the future. Good luck!
posted by RajahKing at 8:04 AM on January 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
But 4, 5, 6 - you can't do anything about those! You even quote your boss in #5 providing a specific reason as to why your job requires immediate feedback (not a good reason, mind you, but its a reason).
I'd suggest a two step fix here. For 1-3, implement the simple solutions like *don't* respond to non time-sensitive emails immediately; practice rejecting that quick fix feeling of "getting things done". Set your inbox so emails from your boss go one place that you get to right away. Others go elsewhere, so you can glance and see if they are time-sensitive.
But there's no fix at all unless your boss and the wider company culture is amenable to it. If possible, you should spend some time outlining the problem specifically with your boss, in person and verbally: "its hard for me to get any substantive work done because I get a lot of emails and texts - including from you - that interrupt me. Can we implement [this solution] to make it easier for me?"
Remember, they might say no - they already gave you a goofy answer about "anxiety" (which is not generally in bounds of what a supervisee should be required to manage) so you may simply have to accept that this is the job. I know, it sucks, but sometimes recognizing the limitations of a position makes it easier to compartmentalize the stress of it, until you find another in the future. Good luck!
posted by RajahKing at 8:04 AM on January 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
I exited a job exactly like this just weeks before the pandemic started. It was intolerable back then and I'm sure has gotten much worse over the last year. I feel your stress and pain acutely. Every employee got the same treatment from management which only helped reinforce the dynamic, and as much as I would have proudly and emphatically declared before taking that job that I was the master of my own communication domain and people would just have to get used to getting my responses when they got them, dammit (which had always worked before!), there were actual consequences in this company. I was dinged performance-wise multiple times because I regularly came up short against people who did respond immediately or at ridiculous times like 11 am on a Saturday morning. The point about job security is very real and we were all beholden to it.
It never really got better but here are things I tried to some effect:
-- Pomodoro-ing my workday: 25 mins for dedicated work, 5 min break, 25 to catch up on email, repeat. I found that they could usually withstand a <30-minute wait for a response, and 25 minutes of "deep" work was still way better than the haphazard few minutes here and there I had been achieving before.
-- Raising it with my boss in our 1x1s, repeatedly. It would improve for a short while and then we'd get busy or have a bunch of fires and relapse again. We tried various solutions, like adding them to the task board I used for my own personal tracking; that way they could see what I had in the hopper and what I had "in progress" and could somewhat relax knowing that everything was actually on my radar. A CC/BCC system like DarlingBri mentions would have been useful here also. They did eventually start to run more interference with the quesos grande, and gave me some guidance on what to say back if they came down hard on me.
-- Being what felt uncomfortably aggressive about sharing my end-of-day or end-of-week updates with folks (both my boss and their bosses and a few other colleagues who I didn't report to but whose accounts I supported). As a result, they asked or checked in less, and then our 1x1s could be spent on loftier things (like company culture, lol sob). Yes, it's EVEN MOAR email but this alone probably had the greatest effect; me stating proactively (and FREQUENTLY) where I was on X task or that Y idea really was top-of-mind felt ridiculous to me (don't they trust me to do my job?!) but visibly reduced their anxiety. If I ignored their emails and told myself they would hear from me once I had something to share, they would double down on reaching out. Worse, they would then ask other people if they knew whether I had any updates on Z initiative and then I HAD THOSE PEOPLE ASKING FOR INFO TOO OMFG.
-- Measuring just how much of my damn time was spent on email each day for internal purposes. When contrasted against time (not) spent on our actual customers, this metric looked absolutely awful. If my colleagues didn't get a response on email within X minutes, they'd jump over to spamming me on Slack, which only lengthened the amount of time I spent replying to such-and-such matter and made searching for info later a nightmarish task because it was impossible to remember what had been discussed where.
You sound like you've got a good handle on the personal communication. For friends and fam who enjoy spamming me with texts, I will occasionally put the "do not disturb" alert on just their conversation thread so I'm not being dinged constantly when they sound like they're in a chatty mood. Over time they have relearned.
posted by anderjen at 8:45 AM on January 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
It never really got better but here are things I tried to some effect:
-- Pomodoro-ing my workday: 25 mins for dedicated work, 5 min break, 25 to catch up on email, repeat. I found that they could usually withstand a <30-minute wait for a response, and 25 minutes of "deep" work was still way better than the haphazard few minutes here and there I had been achieving before.
-- Raising it with my boss in our 1x1s, repeatedly. It would improve for a short while and then we'd get busy or have a bunch of fires and relapse again. We tried various solutions, like adding them to the task board I used for my own personal tracking; that way they could see what I had in the hopper and what I had "in progress" and could somewhat relax knowing that everything was actually on my radar. A CC/BCC system like DarlingBri mentions would have been useful here also. They did eventually start to run more interference with the quesos grande, and gave me some guidance on what to say back if they came down hard on me.
-- Being what felt uncomfortably aggressive about sharing my end-of-day or end-of-week updates with folks (both my boss and their bosses and a few other colleagues who I didn't report to but whose accounts I supported). As a result, they asked or checked in less, and then our 1x1s could be spent on loftier things (like company culture, lol sob). Yes, it's EVEN MOAR email but this alone probably had the greatest effect; me stating proactively (and FREQUENTLY) where I was on X task or that Y idea really was top-of-mind felt ridiculous to me (don't they trust me to do my job?!) but visibly reduced their anxiety. If I ignored their emails and told myself they would hear from me once I had something to share, they would double down on reaching out. Worse, they would then ask other people if they knew whether I had any updates on Z initiative and then I HAD THOSE PEOPLE ASKING FOR INFO TOO OMFG.
-- Measuring just how much of my damn time was spent on email each day for internal purposes. When contrasted against time (not) spent on our actual customers, this metric looked absolutely awful. If my colleagues didn't get a response on email within X minutes, they'd jump over to spamming me on Slack, which only lengthened the amount of time I spent replying to such-and-such matter and made searching for info later a nightmarish task because it was impossible to remember what had been discussed where.
You sound like you've got a good handle on the personal communication. For friends and fam who enjoy spamming me with texts, I will occasionally put the "do not disturb" alert on just their conversation thread so I'm not being dinged constantly when they sound like they're in a chatty mood. Over time they have relearned.
posted by anderjen at 8:45 AM on January 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
I would personally continue replying to emails as soon as they come in, but put in place some strategies to deal with the other issues.
* Decide on a limit for how much back and forth is acceptable. Once you reach that limit, organise a meeting with the person instead.
* In some situations, you don't necessarily need to reply back with your completed answer straight away. Maybe you reply back something to the effect of "Thanks for your email. I'll look into this and will get back to you by [date/time]".
posted by kinddieserzeit at 4:29 PM on January 21, 2021
* Decide on a limit for how much back and forth is acceptable. Once you reach that limit, organise a meeting with the person instead.
* In some situations, you don't necessarily need to reply back with your completed answer straight away. Maybe you reply back something to the effect of "Thanks for your email. I'll look into this and will get back to you by [date/time]".
posted by kinddieserzeit at 4:29 PM on January 21, 2021
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by DarlingBri at 5:21 AM on January 21, 2021 [4 favorites]