How it’s grown
We’ve just got back from a week away. We had Wi-Fi in the
place where we stayed but didn’t check on Christmas Day nor on the way home. My
husband looked at his inbox this morning and had 105 messages. And that’s just
his personal account. We’re both off work for two weeks and goodness knows what
we’ll find in our work accounts when we return on 4 January.
Interestingly we had far less snailmail than we used to have
as little as two years ago and there was very little junk mail. Our spam
filters work well and get rid of most of the junk email. We have opted for most
bills and invoices to be sent electronically but that only explains the
increase partially.
My husband found only one important message though the rest
of them were useful and interesting.
For me the main use of being on leave is to get away from
the bombardment of it all anyway.
Servant not master
Email is there to serve us, not to be our master. Much of
the time it represents other people’s agendas. “Don’t switch on your email
until you have done an hour of other work first,” suggested our HR business
partner. Good advice. I’d go even further, however, and say that do two hours
of other work first.
Sometimes email is used for emergencies. If you really can’t
find another way of communicating urgent messages – what about texting, instant
messaging, mobile phones – the trick is to switch it on but ignore anything
that isn’t urgent. That’s not easy but it can be done.
Psychological trick
Not checking regularly can have a draw-back. You are left
wondering what is waiting. True, as a programme leader, I often have a few
emails from colleagues and students alerting me to problems that are not easy
to solve. It’s important to remember that those problems would exist even if we
didn’t have email and that in fact the email warns us of them sooner rather
than later and this means that we’re dealing with the problem sooner. The
problem is the problem not the email itself.
Sometimes a colleague sends you something asking you to do
more work. Often work is necessary but perhaps not immediately and it may be
less important than some other work you’re already doing. Just take care to
assign its own place and set up a routine that means you’ll deal with it in a timely
way.
If you analyse the proportion of tricky and urgent emails to
others you will see that they are the minority though may take more of your
time. The rest are useful, interesting, possibly ones that you don’t have time
for now and often very encouraging ones.
We need to train ourselves to relish opening our mail boxes,
not dreading it.
Full mailboxes
Yes this is a common problem. Mine was full the other
day. One student had sent me the same
email three times with huge pictures attached. They were too big to be
submitted as part of an assignment via our virtual learning environment (VLE). We
asked her to resize, I double-deleted her email and we were in business again. Yes,
we need to keep copies of lots of things but with some discipline this can be
come manageable. Below, I’ll describe a routine I find useful.
Try face-to-face
Emails have the advantage of being quick and can be sent at
a time that suits you. They have the disadvantages that nuance and sub-text are
lost and the exchange actually takes longer to complete the discussion. There
is little point in emailing someone who is working just down the corridor
unless you need to send them a lot of content - e.g. graphs, figures and big
documents. Even if you do need to send the later, use the email for that and
have the conversation face-to-face. Walking across the car park with someone
the other day saved me half an hour of email exchanges.
Routine and discipline
I have found a routine that works for me. I complete any core
business of the day – make urgent phone calls or prepare for tomorrow’s
teaching, meetings or training courses for example before I go to my email. I then work through everything back to the
start of the day before and anything before that that I can now delete, file or
action. Each email gets deleted or filed into a folder. I’ll then go through my
sent folder and file any that need keeping into the appropriate folder and
delete the rest. Occasionally I’ll leave something in the inbox or sent box because
I don’t need to keep it forever but I do want it for a while. Then I’ll delete
the deleted folder.
At the beginning of each calendar year I delete any emails
that are over five years old.
Occasionally the Inbox still fills. I can then quite safely
sort the inbox oldest first and delete a month’s worth of emails.
Occasionally if I’m very busy, for example when the
marking’s in, I might only answer urgent ones and may put an automatic reply on
to that effect. Sometimes, the non-urgent problems have solved themselves by
the time I get to them.
Some Local netiquette
Copy and reply
It’s good to get into the habit of distinguishing between
who you want to receive the email and who you just want to see a copy of it. For the latter you should address them on the
cc or bcc line. You don’t expect a reply though a reply is allowed. Likewise,
you’re not expected to reply if you’re cc’d or bcc’d. You can of course and you
may or may not feel you need to keep a copy of that mail.
Think carefully about whom you copy in. Does this person really need to be involved
at this point? If we’re all careful about this, then it becomes safe to assume
that if your cc’d, the sender really wanted you to know about this matter.
Reply all
It’s tempting to reply all to general messages so that your
colleagues can see what you think. But ask yourself each time is this really
necessary for everybody on the list to see your response or does only the
sender need to know? Or possibly just a few
people on the list?
All hours of the night and day
Whilst it’s perfectly possible to send emails at 2.00 a.m.
and our students certainly do, we should really not expect our colleagues to be
working at that time or to reply at that time. If I’ve not managed my sweep
before the evening I’ll do it then, or if I suddenly think of something I may send
an email on a Sunday afternoon, but I’m not expecting a reply then, nor do I
expect my colleague to work at that time even if they can’t fit everything into
what might be described as a normal working week. If I work “out of hours” I’m
not expecting my colleague to. I also expect them to extend me the same
courtesy. Craftily, we can send emails “out of hours” via our VLE so don’t have
to open the Pandora’s Box that is the inbox.
Managing student expectation
No, we are not at our desks 24/7. In fact, we’re expected to
answer email within three working days, normally.
That might mean if something else is pressing – a conference, marking, a
heavy teaching load – it might take longer. Most of the time, we answer within
two working days. Sometimes we answer straight away. However, the latter cannot
become the norm. We certainly can’t be answering emails whilst we’re eating,
shopping, spending time with our families, teaching or doing other work for the
university.
Often students can find the information they seek another
way:
·
Consulting their VLE
·
Visiting us during our office hours
·
Setting up a meeting or phone call for another
time.
It’s quite interesting, too, how long it takes our students sometimes
to respond to the emails we send them.
In the end, though, email is a very useful tool, and if managed
sensibly can be of good service to us.
