To find the concept of "sparing your inbox" ridiculous and unachievable

[Thepeopleversuswork]

I get something like 400 emails a day at work on an average day. I work in a fairly fast-paced role but it can't be that unusual. People naturally sometimes struggle to keep on top of emails and grumble about it but it is what it is. A lot of what we do is team based so in the nature of the job its necessary to include anything from three to ten team members in an email so people are aware of what's happening even if not directly relevant to them. This means you sometimes end up with a lot of spam or irrelevant email.

Periodically someone will come up with the bright idea of trying to reduce inbox traffic and there will be invocations to not "reply all" to people saying "thanks" etc and campaigns to 'spare inboxes'. A completely understandable sentiment but it never works: in the ten plus years I've worked at my company this has been tried at least five times, usually by a newcomer, always without success, and always quietly dropped.

More recently someone has come up with the idea of "sanctioning" repeat offenders who reply all under what is being called the "spare you inbox" policy. The idea is that people who reply all improperly will be subject to some as yet unspecified sanction.

AIBU to think its futile to try to contain this and trying to mandate it is a bit nuts? It's like trying to hold back the tide. Cutting down on one or two unnecessary emails out of several hundred a day won't touch the sides. Also because in the nature of the work you have to have visibility across what's happening so better for people to have one or two pointless emails a day they can delete than miss something important? And ultimately because it's impossible to police this during a busy working day and giving people sanctions for stuff like this is going to create unnecessary resentment.

I think the whole idea of 'sparing your inbox' (which you see all the time in the world of work) is a nonsense and the answer is just to ignore or delete the emails rather than creating even more pointless and burdensome email etiquette?

Massive issue, imo. If you reply and remove the irrelevant people from the ‘all’, some don’t notice and assume everyone is in and carry on as if they are. Others reply all and add a few people in, this sharing things they potentially shouldn’t be privy to.

I think essentially the long way round- reply all and masses of wasted emailing- is the only way to be sure everyone is in.

Im using the react option now- a thumbs up or heart to show I’ve seen and appreciate the message- rather than a pointless reply.

400!?!

Christ.

at my workplace a while ago they introduced a clarity policy on writing emails which honestly helped.

they also put in the policy standard headers for emails so for example if it was updating the fire policy or something it would be headed INFO if you actually needed to do something as a result it was ACTION etc.

Also guidelines on keeping it short which frankly were welcome especially as some of the senior leaders liked to send war and peace equivalent.

I appreciate I sound like a dinosaur but so many of my work emails could be replaced very easily with a very brief chat. I get nothing like 400 a day, usually 50-75 ish but I feel like I'm bombarded by them and cannot keep on top of them. I've got 300 in my inbox at the moment, having had a major cull this week but they are still making me twitch.

This. We use a project management system with individual projects and all files, emails, diary / calendar and tasks are kept on the project. We can assign tasks to ourselves or other people, and mark these off when complete with a comment. Every person who works that project has access to all this information.

400 is bonkers. Department chats on Teams (or equivalent) work better than mails for a lot of things, you can see the messages in the right order, everyone sees the conversation and knows who's actioned what, when.
As far as mails go, "Thank you" is polite, particularly if you don't work in the same team as someone who's just done you a favour by responding quickly to a query. You DON'T need to reply-all to say it though!
Also "Clean-up conversation" in Outlook works well and massively reduces the noise in one's inbox.

I think you've missed my point. I agree that sending a "reply all" with something non essential is stupid.

My point was that you can't control this through sanctions, it's impossible to police.

The culture needs to change

Teams for short messages

divert emails from repeat offenders elsewhere unless marked as urgent (please clarify what urgent is, some people may need some help with this one)

ensure your Out Of Office gives a guide on how long it may take to action an email (three working days etc ) and if urgent to a shared inbox

USE THE PHONE /Teams, less arse covering so this can be really triggering for some, but can we take it back to the 90s please where we spoke to each other?

ignore

delete

move to spam

Urgency culture needs to get in the fucking bin, along with its 1000s of emails.

Unless your job is actually email opener and replier, then I g needs to change. Your eyesight must be taking a beating.

I manage a shared admin inbox and everyone sends an email for everything, we are sat in the same office! Just come ask me. Where I used to work we made a conscious effort to reduce the emails by using teams for lots of the ‘small stuff’ and share point for blanks of all the forms and proformas we needed. People just like the arse covering of emailing!

You get an email every minute !? How do you get work done

Sorry you think I missed the point, I was trying to be helpful. I thought that was a fairly direct response to the issue you raised.

You mentioned that transparency is an important requirement in your workplace, and my response was that there are well established project management software systems and work processes that provide transparency across teams without relying on email chains.

If your goal is to improve the sanctions based approach, it may be worth exploring which would be most suitable for your workplace. My workplace uses a similar system as @Potatoelephant, and it provides visibility and accountability while reducing the need for mass email communication.

In any case whether communication happens by email or through more contemporary project management platforms, workplace communication generally works best when people assume good intentions and treat each other with courtesy 😉

My god, your company needs to set some ground rules! Think how many working hours are wasted managing 400 emails a day! What a waste of time.

God I’m so glad I’m out of the corporate world nonsense

I think I'd cry at that.

We have a team inbox and each day a different team member is in charge of the inbox - they answer queries, forward to the relevant team member or other team as required. If it's a "for info" email they copy relevant info (if it's even relevant) to the week's shared notepad and colleagues check that for updates. We use trello for the project we manage and have a teams chat for quick questions between the team.

I wish if anyone thinks about reply to all there was an ‘are you sure’ step to tick.

And yes, people should be required to manage email properly.

That is a ridiculous amount of email.

We use Slack at my company, and almost everything is sorted that way, right from CEO to receptionist. For example, being informed about something can be dealt with by a 'react' rather than typing and sending a reply. Documents are all shared so anytime can see what's what for something they are working on.

I send <5 emails a day and receive even fewer from colleagues - mostly HR system notifications.

Yabu,

Our inboxes are practically empty compared to this and it’s because we follow these three simple rules.

1. If you wouldn’t call someone directly about it then you don’t need to email them about it. So call them.

2. Email is for essential external client communication mainly. Occasionally internally for file/ info transfer.

—- 2a) Innane / useful or unimportant chatter is done on whatsapp communities in well categorized groups.

—- 2b) Essential announcements are done on WhatsApp communities using the announcement feature.

3. Suppliers, contractors and anyone wanting our company details is expressly informed in a lighthearted (but also serious joking not joking way) that if you send marketing or other clutter emails you will be blocked by the owner and he will never use your services/ products again.

This isn’t helpful to the OP, but might give you a chuckle. This reminds me of something that happened years ago in my company (global business employing hundreds of thousands of associates).

An email went out to the wrong mailing list. The mailing list turned out to have over 100,000 people on it. Most people realised it wasn’t relevant and deleted it. But then we started to receive the ones where people hit “reply all” and ask “what is this?” Or say “I don’t think was for me” etc there were quite a lot of these. So then others started replying saying “please don’t reply all as this is a huge nailing list”. So we all got a ton of those style emails. Then you got a few people who started making joke comments about what was happening, sent to everyone. Then you got people start begging everyone to stop replying all.

The problem was, by this stage, the amount of email traffic has massively slowed down the server. So by the time you started seeing the “please don’t reply all” emails, several thousand people had sent the same thing. Basically it ended up crashing the entire global intranet and email! You couldn’t report the issue to our IT people because the system was down. It was an absolute mess (but very funny to watch it unfolding). I remember one guy, clearly frustrated, replied basically calling everyone morons… pretty sure that was a career limiting move by him 🤣

I have always wondered why people feel the need to reply all to a mailing list and say they shouldn’t be on there - just reply to the sender, surely? If you reply all, no-one else gives a shit, you’ve just annoyed them by giving them an extra email to read!

400 a day is the sign that something is wrong.
I have something like 5 a day, almost always people external to the business, internally, everything is on Slack and Notion.

There could be some agreed upon rules such as use the react option, shared inbox for groups, or thanks is implied, no need to send an email about it. I have seen many people have saying that, A thank you is implied or similar, in their signature. Something has to change because the current system is unsustainable and overburdening.

I tried many times and many ways to encourage email reduction and people are just so resistant to it, they feel a desperate need to see everything, be on everything and document everything. So now I just use outlook rules to delete and file 80% of my emails without me ever touching it.

CC me into whatever you like, it all goes into my CC folder and gets auto marked as read, if you didn’t actually send it to me and just wanted me to observe the presence of the email then I’m not engaging with it.

Nobody can keep on top of 400 emails a day!
Can you not set up folders so a lot of junk goes straight in there?
We also use teams chats a lot in my work which has cut down on emails a lot.
Pointless reply all emails really piss me off.

I do notice though that some departments in my company will cc their whole team in on every single email, which I find bizarre and annoying- I’m sure I would if I worked there. I think it’s more to do with micromanaging than “visibility”. Are you sure it’s not the whole culture of the company that’s bad? If you’re all doing your actual work in the evenings and weekends that’s really not great and not normal.

I just set up rules to divert emails that I know I don’t need to other folders, and then empty those folders regularly without reading the emails. Wouldn’t work though if I didn’t know if I needed to read the email or not

YABU

400 emails a day is very inefficient. Something needs to change. You sound like one of those “we’ve always done it this way “ people…

Heaven forbid when you take a week or two’s leave! Your inbox must self combust.

Email culture is mad though isn't it? I think we'll look back and marvel at how inefficient it is.