Take me off the endless email threads

Question

I recently asked to be taken off an email thread that was producing about 20 back-and-forths a day and had nothing to do with me. My boss caught wind of this and scolded me. He said he wanted me up-to-date on my co-workers' progress. How do I convince him that these email threads are clogging up my inbox and preventing me from getting real work done?

Answer 1

So set up a folder for each project like that one and a mail rule to direct the emails there.

Then once a day, or every other day, a quick gander will keep you up to date.

Leaving the inbox for more directly relevant stuff.

Answer 2

How do I convince him that these email threads are clogging up my inbox and preventing me from getting real work done?

You can't convince him because this is a bogus argument. There are a myriad of ways of handling this from configuring various email client settings to not reading emails just because you received one.

Clogging up your inbox is a bit overly dramatic, and doesn't prevent you doing meaningful work.

Answer 3

How do I convince him that these email threads are clogging up my inbox and preventing me from getting real work done?

One of the first training received at the company I work at includes efficient management of e-mails. I was dismissive at first, I've learned to really appreciate it.

There are multiple things required to efficiently manage your e-mails:

1. Time Management:
   • Disable e-mail notifications -- whether sound, pop-up, or anything else. E-mails are for asynchronous communications, they can wait a few hours.
   • Handle e-mails in batch, on your schedule. Whatever the schedule is doesn't matter, it can reserved time, or flexible "in between" time. The important point is to only handle e-mails when you have time, when this doesn't interrupt your work.
2. Empty inbox:
   • Automated e-mails which generally do not require attention (I get many) should be automatically dispatched to the appropriate folder. Consider them as "archives".
   • Your inbox should be reserved for mails "to be handled". Depending on the volume of e-mails there are multiple strategies:
     • Small volume: any e-mail "to be handled".
     • Medium volume: any e-mail "to be dispatched", where dispatching is skimming and deciding whether it needs further handling. If not, then move it to the appropriate folder, and if it does... also move it to the appropriate folder -- different from the precedent.
     • Large volume: same technique, but nested. One folder per project/sub-project with its own "inbox", "to be handled", and other sub-folders.
   • E-mails which you need to reply to, but for which building the reply will take time (for whatever reason) go to a "to be handled" folder. If necessary, you may schedule time (as estimated) to reply to them later.
3. To / CC / BCC:
   • BCC is perhaps the clearest: it's for people that are in copy, secretly. Either your boss, to keep them in the loop without seeming to escalate the issue, or when sending announcements to avoid people replying to everyone.
   • To vs CC is a bit subtle. In general, there seems to be an agreement that:
     • To: people from which an action (reply, actual action, ...) is expected.
     • CC: people just kept in the loop, or people acting as "back-up" for a "To" person.

That's the gist of it!

I'll throw in a few tips on top, though they are vastly less important:

• Use "Conversation mode" so that the entire conversation takes a single line in your inbox no matter the number of replies.
• If you need to regularly chase people, you'll want a folder "to follow-up on" where you keep the e-mails for which you are waiting replies to.

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Now, let's apply it to your situation:

1. Those e-mails should not clog your inbox. Even if you manually have to sort them out, it's just a quick "Move To" action and they're gone.
2. Those e-mails should not prevent you from doing your work:
   • You don't have notifications, so they do not interrupt.
   • When you do handle them, they're quickly moved out of the way.

And that is the worst case, because ideally you'll be applying a rule: all e-mails related to a project should either have a project tag in the subject or be directed to a specific mailing list, which can be used to apply rule. And if that is not the case, you should be promoting the idea. It eases everyone's life.

Just be careful -- do not automatically move+mark as read an e-mail you are in "To" of, in case there's an actual action you need to take in there, such as answering a question.

Answer 4

My boss caught wind of this and scolded me. He said he wanted me up-to-date on my co-workers' progress. How do I convince him that these email threads are clogging up my inbox and preventing me from getting real work done?

You do as you are told.

Your boss already knows you don't want to be involved in this email but has decided you need to be.

No one said you had to agree with or like your orders.

Twenty emails a day should not be "clogging up your inbox". You need to organize your mail folders and move stuff to appropriate folders either manually or using automated filters.

If these emails are very lengthy and this is the source of the problem you need to explain to your boss that this is the case and suggest the team involved produce e.g. a summary document each week rather than requiring everyone to follow the entire discussion. This may, however, be something your boss wants you to see in detail for e.g. training purposes.

Answer 5

Even if you could somehow convince him, do you really want to be the one making an issue out of something that isn’t an issue for anyone else? Being seen as difficult to deal with at work is almost never a good thing, especially by your boss. Maybe he’ll understand your position so well, he’ll start leaving you off other threads as well, even some that might be of great interest to you.

Ignore them, filter them, turn off notifications, google “how to deal with distracting email chains.” Just don’t do the one thing your boss asked you not to do.

Answer 6

You might want to consider switching away from email. Collaborative chat environments, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and many others have replaced endless emails and reply chains for many companies. I work in a 24/7/365 IT environment and if we still used email, I would start every morning with 100s of emails. With these collaborative environments, Everyone can be subscribed to the channels that matter to them and read and reply to everything in one place. While I still have email, I maybe get one or two per week. The biggest challenge is convincing your company to try this new method.

Answer 7

I think Dave Crenshaw would say that you can still read the e-mail threads but still be focused. Solution: Set a certain time of the day to check e-mail instead of checking e-mail/your phone every time you get a notification.

For starters, schedule a time to process everything. Having a specific time to go through your stuff keeps everything from hanging in limbo.

https://davecrenshaw.com/4-simple-steps-managing-email/

https://davecrenshaw.com/email-inbox/

Answer 8

I know you didn't ask this, but what about using Jira or asana users can comment on their progress, problems, and any other issue? Using a tool like jira/asana has helped me reduce the number of random email conversations I get.

Answer 9

Using your experience to occasionally redirect your colleagues is "real work." Yes, sometimes it takes some of your time that is fruitless, but it's worth it if occasionally you can save other people a lot of time.

What I do is allocate a half hour every morning, and occasionally when I have downtime between other tasks, and put things into rough categories:

• I can safely ignore it just from the title.
• I need to scan the content to know if I need to weigh in.
• I need to carefully read the content to know if I need to weigh in.
• This requires my full attention and I need to allocate some time for it.

The vast majority of things fall into one of the first two categories. I get maybe one or two of the third category per day, and maybe two or three of the last category per month.

Also, people don't always know what is useful to include you on. I had some pretty important input on something this week that I was only incidentally notified about. It's better to be included unnecessarily, than to be accidentally left off when you had important input. If you start asking to be removed from threads, people are going to become more reluctant about including you in the first place. And often, just knowing that you saw something and didn't see a need to intervene is helpful to others.

So find a way to manage the clutter and your career will thank you for it.

Answer 10

Just direct them to spam.

Anything that can be solved with technology is not worthy of human interaction. Just set up a rule that emails from X or emails with specific phrases go to spam/archive/a custom folder for garbage.