Worst Practices: E-mail (Part I)

Various ProfHacker writers have said that the point of the site isn’t that we always know best–in fact, many excellent ideas have already come from commenters!–but rather that we’re interested in thinking through common problems in teaching, research, service, and other aspects of academic life.  And sometimes those “common problems” are self-inflicted.  Plus, often complaints about e-mail devolve into complaints about how other people do e-mail.  But we’re all other people, right? In the hopes that awareness and accurate description will lead to improvement, here are two of my biggest obstacles to achieving Inbox Zero (either as a literal count or as a metaphor).

Too Fast

Sometimes, when processing e-mail, I’ll get a message that 1) it would take about 90 seconds to answer, because 2) I know the answer immediately. But I won’t answer.  Why?

Because, in my head, it would be rude to reply too quickly.  It would mean that I don’t care about their question, or didn’t consider some nuance that would lead me to respond with greater care and time.  So  I defer it for some arbitrary interval, at which point–but you can already see this coming–I’m in fact too distracted by newer questions to reply, and so the original question slips further and further down the screen.  And then it’s late, and the original writer gets crabby because I’m taking too long on what really should’ve been a simple thing.

Big Trumps Little

With any complex, ongoing initiative (whether it’s a class, or a committee, or a research project), there are likely to be several different balls in the air at once.  I tend to “handle” this in one of two ways: First, if I’m late getting you something important, then I’ll often put off all e-mail from you because, after all, they’re probably denunciations of me as a failure.  (Instead of being, for example, perfectly reasonable messages about some completely unrelated aspect of our work other. Which they basically always are.  I have good colleagues, both at school and elsewhere.)  Now, instead of just one thing being late, a whole bunch of work is being held up.  The second “method” is even sneakier: If one project in a particular category is late, then nothing else in that category can advance, either.  So, for example, if I haven’t responded adequately to someone on this committee, then I can’t answer anyone on that committee.  After all, they might compare notes, or something.

In general, my main problem with e-mail is not technical at all: I tend to see the medium, not as an exchange of information, but as something akin to grooming in other primates, except the parasites are all in my head.  This semester I’m trying to leach as much affect as possible from controlling my inbox.  Trying.  Well, mostly failing–but trying.

Image by flickr user ezola / CC licensed