Name changed for this just in case. I've worked with a new boss for about 18 months now and his email etiquette is incredibly irritating.
On the whole he's a great boss, nice guy, our 'clients' (we're a corporate service so internal users) love him, he's very charming and a good presentor etc. But this one thing is getting right on my tits. Basically he likes to 'clear off' easy or trivial email responses pretty much instantly whereas I'm more of a work on my inbox a couple of times a day person. For clarity I always reply with at the very least a holding response within 24 hours, which is viewed as unusually responsive within our organisation (public sector in case you can't guess😏) where it's pretty common for people to take days to reply to even a quick query and to totally ignore or have to be chased for anything harder. Fine as it goes, people have different ways of working etc etc, it does slightly give me anxiety about emailing him when I know he'll feel the need to fire replies back at me instantly even if I clearly mark it not urgent. But the major issue is we're a pretty heavy inbox service, we get a lot of emails every day and this habit really disrupts his ability to ever focus on everything else because emails are coming in nearly all the time. The thing is it's rubbing off on the whole rest of the team who he expects to work in the same way, and our longer term/more complicated or proactive pieces of work have suffered since he started as he's constantly interrupting people to deal with the more day to day or easy queries.
For instance yesterday I was deep in writing a quite complicated document when I see he's forwarded me an email from a client within 5 mins of him receiving it, a simple query to answer (he doesn't have quite the same technical knowledge as me so relies on me for these things) - I would probably have replied same day but after I'd finished with the document, would have happily replied to the client myself or drafted something for him. But no, within 10 mins of sending me the email he's ringing me wanting to discuss a response and draft it together to 'clear it off'. When I say I'm working on something else and can it wait, he agrees it's not urgent but still wants to 'quickly' agree what we're going to say and effectively draft it together, which by the time we've done that has taken 15 minutes and I've totally lost my flow with my other document. This can easily happen 5 times in a day and that's just me, he does the same with my team too 😡. I honestly think he spends the majority of his day in this 'clearing off' process and that's why he doesn't get anything else done. Half of this stuff doesn't even need his input if he would just delegate and count that as cleared off but until he actually sees the email response it seems not!
I've tried pointing out that the longer term/proactive work will make much more of a difference to our clients than receiving emails instantly compared to in a few hours (and read between the lines, therefore to his reputation and career prospects) and he agrees in theory but then says because he uses the weekends to work on the more in depth stuff it's fine to be more reactive in the weekdays. The problem with that is (a) it's fine for him to work weekends if he wants, he's highly paid and senior enough that's fair, but I and particularly my team are not! (b) The work he does at weekends is very rarely producing things himself, it's reviewing documents or analysis or whatever produced by the team, due to point a we can only do the work in the week and if he keeps filling everyone's time with other stuff it won't happen and (c) in reality he barely works at the weekend, maybe a couple of hours max but not enough to compensate for him filling hours with crafting basic emails together Mon-Fri... GRR! The thing is the easy emails are easy and it gives him a sense of accomplishment to have a clear inbox and lots of superficially happy clients because he's so responsive (but not really happy because their actual work is not getting done), whereas the hard work is hard and easier to avoid.
TLDR is my boss the way he is and I just have to accept it or has anyone had success in getting a boss to change their ways?