How bad are your unread work emails?

[RosieLeaLovesTea]

How bad are your unread work emails and how long have you worked there?
for reference I had 1700 unread emails this morning. After a couple of hours I have cut it down to 845. Still got a way to go. I have worked there 3 yrs.

I'm on top of mine but manager has 3500 unread
Makes me incredibly anxious but I think it is indicative of their organisation which is, quite frankly, shit.

None, I flag, categorise, file or delete. There's about 15 categorised and awaiting actions.
Now my personal Gmail is a different story and an absolute nightmare.

I'm a read (scan)-file away or delete person. Nothing is unread. Some I keep as reminders of actions coming up /progress, although I try to update other files with that info.

Zero unread emails. I keep them as unread until I've handled them or I'd be forgetting things right, left and center.

I have old of read emails though. I long for inbox zero, but it's a pipe dream a fear.

Same here.

If anyone in my team has over 100 unread emails I make a point of asking them to at least read them all and take action as required before our next one-to-one meeting.

Work emails now automatically deleted after three years, unread or not.

It's *brilliant^. I've lost loads and so far only needed to ask one to be resent.

When I get back from hols, I sweep all emails into a folder called 'abin' and wait for anyone to follow up anything h they sent me while I was away.

None. Been there 6 years.

I’m happy to ask people to stop cc’ing me into emails I don’t need to see.

But even so I wouldn’t allow unread emails to build up like that.

My home email has loads, on the other hand.

I will never for the life of me understand why people don't just delete emails they are needlessly cc'd into.

Ours is 90 days 😂

I do the same. I've got 1,800 or so unread in under a year. There's no need to read them all.

If I end my week with enough emails (read or otherwise) that I need to scroll down the page, then I've failed. They get read and deleted / read and replied and then deleted / read and filed for info.

@FrangipaniBlue

Ours is 90 days

#winning

I have a job which is about 60% emails so I have to be really on top of them. When I closed down yesterday I had 41 emails in my inbox with none unread. I deal with them and file as I go along, I've got colleagues who keep emails in their inboxes and I don't know how they keep track of everything!

Ok. It sounds awful but mine are in the 10,000s. Every time there is a change in any drawing/plan/document I get notified by email. I’m on top of what I need to actually do and I’ve set up auto move to put them into a separate folder. But the emails are ridiculous and it’s just an automated thing. I never delete anything as there is no need and we need to keep a paper trail for auditing purposes. Doesn't bother me at all, but I’ve seen people have palpitations when they see my email!!

9
4 unread from Friday
The other 5 are flagged to go back to next week closer to the deadlines for things that need doing.
It's my first job over coffee as I arrive 20 min before I start as we sometimes have last minute 8.30am briefings

I work with a woman who prints her emails and files them per project. It's incredibly frustrating - her office is STUFFED with lever arch files Full of print outs of stuff she has on her emails.

I'm a read, file for future reference or flag to action person. There is no way I could have a high level of unread emails, how would you know if you had missed something important? However I am ruthless with pointless cc'd conversations and will politely ask people not to cc me in to the every tiny thing until it needs my attention, same goes for reply all people. I sometimes wonder how much time is wasted on filtering out unnecessary communication in the workplace, how did we ever manage before emails and Teams chats 🙈 I don't think we are any more productive or efficient now than we were 20 years ago.

More than 10,000 and it doesn’t bother me at all.

I am near the top of a large organisation. My team and my peers know to speak to me rather than email me. I have an alert set up for the 3 people senior to me, but they also speak rather than emailing.

Company culture is that people at senior level need to be actively engaged and not “paper pushing”. It’s obviously different at different levels of the organisation. (And of course it is different in other organisations.)

76 unread but they don’t need to be read. 17 years. My personal email box on the other hand has 20k unread. All marketing shit/junk.

I don’t have anything unread, I hate having an unread notification it makes me fe stressed so open everything on receipt so that they show as read straight away. I haven’t actually read all of them though! I just open them to remove the notification, I only read the ones that look important.

If they don't need reading, or are marketing shite, why not just delete on receipt?

I've got about 850 unread and 1400 in total in my inbox.

Every six months I delete the lot and start again.

There is too much email traffic nowadays and I also look after two extremely senior people in my firm so I am copied into everything.

280 ish but I leave ones unread that I know I don’t need to answer as I get copied into lots of data etc that I don’t need to do anything with.
zero that need answering or reading.

15 years over 10k unread emails. I'm known as someone who does answer emails promptly so I think I'm filtering correctly most of the time

What the absolute fuck. Where do you all work ?!

I have zero unread emails. If the content doesn’t concern me I delete them. I’m not even that organised as a person.