To have filed all work emails received last week without reading or doing anything with them?

[MrsBertMacklin]

I had a tantrum in my head today at work about emails. I was on holiday last week, came back to 20 or so emails in one chain which seemed to just be a conversation about something. Others amounted to about 100 in total.

I've just filed them all with the reasoning that if there's actually one in there that I need to act on, the sender would have seen my out of office and will chase me at some point this week if they need to.

I know that puts the onus on the sender to nag and I will read the filed emails at some point to make sure I don't miss anything important, but 99% of mail I receive is a load of wank about stuff that has been covered in meetings, or is just decision making in progress.

I wonder if at some point business culture will just calm down about emails and start treating them as letters, or whether this is it now.

I know it's tempting but actually 100 emails isn't that many - i went out of the office for a couple of hours on Monday and came back to 59 emails. I second what someone else said, I don't have time to chase up people, if I ask them to do something I expect them to do it.
If there's an email trail, read the last one so you can scan through the trail, if it's not relevant, delete.
Delete all meeting acceptances etc
If it's for information for later, move it to a read later folder.
Delete junk mail.
If you're not sure whether it's still an issue just email backs stock response 'I've just picked up this email but been away from the office for a week. Can you let me know if you still need this doing?' Then delete it.

That's the vast majority done and it probably took 15 minutes max for 100 emails.

It will depends on the ethos of your workplace. It would not be acceptable at mine and an OOo that said emails were being deleted, resend on x date would be considered hugely unprofessional and would be very damaging come review time as would be taken as indicative as a poor attitude. So be very careful.

Interesting. Our work OOO messages are all set up to say this automatically (well words to that effect). Different strokes.....

My emails auto forward to whichever colleague I have handed over to and my out of office States that they are being auto forwarded and gives a number and email contact. It also explains that they will be deleted from my mailbox and if anyone needs to follow up with me personally to email/phone on x date.

Unfortunately because of some wanky work policy we have to have our mobile numbers on our email signature so what actually happens is they get my out of office and ring my mobile.

Still- I don't have loads of emails to deal with when I get back- unless you count the hundreds of internal emails about photocopiers and printing in colour and washing up your cups

I can't delete emails without reading them in my job, it's unprofessional and I'd get a bollocking if I got found out. I think you should at least read them before filing them away OP.

I was on the receiving end of a 'I've deleted your email without reading it' message. It was from an academic and I needed to find out info prior to an application deadline for a PhD. I decided I didn't want to study there if that was his/their attitude!

I also couldn't get away with not reading the emails. A lot of my emails aren't for me to react to, but just to keep me in the loop. I'm currently working on a project with over 300 people on it - there's a lot of emails about lots of stuff and my client (I'm a consultant) needs me to be up to date with everything that might concern him, even if I don't have to do a concrete piece of work.

Also, in the past, certain things have been said and validated in a meeting our stream wasn't invited to. But we were in copy of the minutes. We have to read them to ensure decisions weren't taken in our absence that aren't in our interest.

I've seen archived emails sent 18 months ago used as proof that people in copy of the email were aware of decisions (and as they didn't react 18 months ago, it was taken as consent)

Yanbu i get so many phone calls about rubbish i ignore them too damn busy

My work have taken to group whatapp messages. It's grim and not what you need on a day off - especially as it's on personal phones.

I think yabu but then I've never had a big office job. I'd ask a collegue tbh

100 emails after a week off is nothing! I can easily get that many in a day.

YABU. It shouldn't take more than half an hour to skim through them, work out what is important and either respond or flag those.

Poor email management grinds my gears. I've worked with a few people in the past who have almost bragged that they are 'too busy' to read emails. In reality theory are just inefficient, and failing to read emails means they often missed important deadlines and delayed everyone else's work as well.

10 years ago - I was off work for 3 and a half months after an accident. I had so many emails - in the thousands [I was a manager and also covering for a second area at the time].

My secretary had covered most of them [thank god for proxy access] and filed them under 'important', 'possibly important' and 'meh'. I took the important ones, removed about three that were actually worth doing anything about, and binned the rest. If anything needed doing they all contacted me with 'So you are back - what do you make of this?' and I picked it all back up during the next fortnight.

yabu
I could get fired for that.
just take an hour and skim through. delete anything totally not relevant or already dealt with and sort by priority.
only a hundred?

We have our own business so wouldn't ever send out such a dismissive ooto message. And if an employee of ours sent such a message they'd be in trouble.

It isnt very professional to ignore messages sent to you. I'm sure it wouldn't take you long to sift through them and quickly read so you know what's been going on. You could do it at work surely if you don't want to do it in your own time(which I can understand)

Once upon a time a consultant chased me up about payment. The originating department hadn't done the paperwork to support it. I emailed them and asked for it urgently. The chap then threatened to take us to the small claims court. I emailed the department again and also the person in accounts payable who was responsible for making the payment. He sent another email to say that no response from either in 24 hours he would raise the claim. I forwarded again, marked urgent. He raised the claim. There was an investigation - I came out squeaky clean because I was able to evidence that I had been acting on his messages and had acknowledged receipt to him. Finance and the department had ignored the messages.

Guess what might happen if you don't read your messages.

When I am on holiday I check my email every day. I delete all the sales stuff, and the professional development stuff if I don't want to read it, I pick up urgent issues and pass them on to get dealt with, when I get back after two weeks I generally have about 60 emails, half of which are information only and they get filed into the relevant folder, half of which need to be printed and filed on a proper project file, and the remainder need me to follow up and find out more information.

Job done.

I agree with it being almost a point of pride with some people about how many unread emails they have. One of my current clients updates me daily on how many unread emails she has (last count over 2 100 and she's now gone on holiday for 3 weeks). Very annoying when you need her to answer one of yours!

I used to start writing my question in the title of the email to get a reaction. And she told us that if we need her to react to one of our emails to call her and she'll look at it. Very frustrating because she hadn't read any of the previous emails either so it always took ages to explain anything to her.

"When I am on holiday I check my email every day."

OMG Noooooo. Holidays are about disconnecting for me. That means not dealing with the 100's of emails which I get every day.

However, given that it does bother the OP, I would second the advice of sorting by conversation. If you read the latest email in a thread, you can quickly assess if it needs your active involvement - if not, you can delete the whole thread. Sorting by subject also highlights the HR/process/IT "you need to do this" "you need to do this now" "why haven't you done this yet?" groups, of which you do something about one and delete the rest.

100 emails - 30 mins max to end up with the 5 you need to deal with.

YABU. I'm on holiday at the moment, and after just three days out of the office, I have had 200 emails. It'd be more if fewer people were also on holiday!

100 emails is not that bad. If i send an email and the autorepply indicates that the revipient will be back in a week i expect them to reply when they get back. If they are on leave for several weeks or months i would contact someone else.

I have two bosses, one good and one crap.

The crap one's email inbox is often full so you get your message bounced back. She is only one in the company I know this happens to. Too lazy to clear it!

When your emails do send she then claims she hasn't received them and asks for them to be resent. So you end up re forwarding them again and again.

It doesn't make her look busy and important, just lazy and incompetent. If you can't manage your inbox what chance have you got managing a team?

I get 100 emails a day. If there is a disaster they'll be more. I'm the only person who does my job, I have no deputy and the staff I manage cover 4 areas that are not connected to my job but I'm still expected to know about so get copied into some of their emails as well. (the joys of cuts and making everything combined roles) And no one ever pays the slightest bit of attention to my OOO when I direct them to a colleague so I have to wade through all my emails on my return. I tend to say on my out of office that I'm away for a day longer than I actually am so I can catch up with my emails.

Massively unprofessional in my opinion and you leave yourself open to looking a bit of a twat in meetings when you are shown to be a bit clueless on the developments of a project or latest office news. Not all emails require an action on your part, but they are often of the ?For Your Information? variety and you would be daft not to at least scan read them. Nothing more annoying going into a meeting only to witness someone asking clarifications on a subject that they had been notified about already.

chipshop

You're right in that it looks poor to have an inbox so full that emails bounce back. Most places have generous limits on how much data you can have in an inbox to reach this point.

I have a folder for storing emails. It's a bit like the archive folder, but saved within our team's file folder so doesn't take up my inbox space. I link to it in Outlook and have subfolders so I can keep track of my work easily. When I've dealt with an email in the inbox, I just drag it into the relevant folder.

We have our own business so wouldn't ever send out such a dismissive ooto message. And if an employee of ours sent such a message they'd be in trouble.

The message isn't as blunt as I may have made it sound. It says [named person] will be dealing with the email in X's absence but the original will be deleted from X's in box so if they really need to see it please send again when when they return.

Since in 99 cases out of 100 the client wants to contact the firm not an individual, and they have confirmation that their email is being acted on, we have had no issues with cleints over this. Certainly no client has ever complained.

Those emails that are re-sent tend to be corporate social invitations.

The message isn't as blunt as I may have made it sound. It says [named person] will be dealing with the email in X's absence but the original will be deleted from X's in box so if they really need to see it please send again when when they return.

Still wrong IMO as you are increasing the work of someone else, many of whom may be too busy to make notes etc as to when x y or z is back from holiday.

YABU.

If you stick them all in a folder (or even worse, delete them) without looking at them first, you risk ignoring something that is genuinely important.
Maybe an FYI thing that will impact your work, or one that you just need to be aware of.
Maybe an important task that you need to start work on now - I've come back from holiday before on Monday morning to e-mails from project managers saying things along the line of "I know you're out of the office now, but x needs to be done by Friday so start on it as soon as you're back". Deleting without reading would be a terrible move that could cause me bother, especially if project manager was busy in meetings or out of the office for most of my first week back. Because while they'd be chasing me at some point if it's important, they'd also have assumed that the e-mail would be read, and acted on accordingly once I was back in the office.

I'd skim through them quickly - delete ones that are obviously irrelevant, flag ones that need a closer read or that require you to take some sort of action. It shouldn't take too long to sift out the important e-mails.