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It is _your_ responsibility to configure your mail filters and use your tools to organize your workflow in such a way that you do not miss important emails. You

• yeputons 4y ago
  > It is _your_ responsibility to configure your mail filters It may very well be, but if you _have to_ reach someone who did not, following up sounds like a good advice to me.
  • JamesSwift 4y ago
    Right, and you should almost certainly go alternative routes instead of repeatedly emailing in that case.
• H8crilA 4y ago
  Lol, someone has never seen WAY too many emails despite having good filters.
  • ozim 4y ago
    Had the same reaction and don't forget to add phone calls + whatsapp messages + probably whole days of back to back scheduled meetings. I am not saying phone calls/whatsapp messages from friends but business related. There is no magic productivity tool that helps with that.
• mgfist 4y ago
  Whoever has less power has the responsibility. If the IRS sends you a notice about an audit or something (just as an example), and you miss that because of an unorganized inbox, that's on you. If an entrepreneur emails you for capital and you don't respond, that's on them to follow up.
  • m348e912 4y ago
    If the "IRS" is sending you an email, you're probably being scammed. The real IRS sends letters, via traditional post. In fact, the IRS seems to be anti-technology IMO. IRS.gov has the dumbest password policy I have ever encountered. In your password, you must use subset of 8 special characters, but only once, and it can't be at the beginning or the end of the password. Of course they won't explain that requirement, they will just happily tell you that your password is not valid until you give up. (hopefully this is no longer the case)
    • mgfist 4y ago
      Was just an example. But point still stands with snail mail which many people (myself included) don't go through all that carefully.
• blairbeckwith 4y ago
  I think the problem is that what is important to the sender is not necessarily important to the receiver. I am not Travis of Uber, but I do have expertise in a domain such that I frequently get people reaching out to me to solicit advise or answers to a question. It is very important to the person asking the question that they get an answer. It is less important to me that they get an answer, and so if I'm busy at the moment those emails won't get a response. I do wish more people followed up though, because I do wish to help; the more they follow up without getting angry or hurt, the more likely they are to reach me at a time when I am able to help.
  • mbg721 4y ago
    That principle certainly applies to spam. The messages there are "I want to sell you something," and "I am not particularly interested in buying that thing."
  • ErrantX 4y ago
    This is an important distinction I think. I generally coach people who email regularly to explain the why behind a question or the value to them of me answering. If your consistently failing an audit because I am ignoring you then you you can have an answer.
  • Hizonner 4y ago
    Oh, FFS, if you want to help, then stick unimportant mail in a "maybe when I get around to it" queue. Don't ask/train people to be obnoxious.
    • blairbeckwith 4y ago
      There are two different types of "receives a lot of email". The first type makes up the bulk of the people who receive a lot of email, and that's the type where almost all of the email isn't actionable. Newsletters, receipts, spam, etc. Anything sent in bulk. The second type is people who receive a lot of correspondence – people expecting a response, or otherwise need action. The people who claim that it is the receiver's responsibility to process all of their email almost exclusively fall in to the first type, because nobody who falls in to the second type can reasonably process it all.
• sidlls 4y ago
  Email filters don’t work if the senders don’t respect convention, don’t use context-appropriate content, etc. I consider my work email to be spam, basically.
  • hinkley 4y ago
    There’s a principle in Civics that you should be careful passing ridiculous laws/policies because contempt for one law can quickly become contempt for Law in general. Most companies have ridiculous email policies, and then managers wonder why their reports are missing their messages. Last week I found out someone important quit or was fired six weeks ago. I asked for someone to forward me the message, and it had the most innocuous title ever. Around here if you need to talk to someone you take it to chat, which makes it very hard to record (previously outlook had such a small retention setting that you had to take it to chat it wiki anyway). Conversations happen in email, but they’re slow and often not fruitful.
• JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > it is _your_ responsibility to configure your mail filters and use your tools to organize your workflow in such a way that you do not miss important emails Email is a tool. Different people use it differently. No need to get moralistic about it. I’m not going to make my inbox the centre of my life or even work day. It’s presumptuous to assume everyone else must adopt a workflow that works for you.
  • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Different people work different ways. But if email is a part of your work, then part of your job is handling your email in a reasonable fashion. Asking other people to work around your broken workflow (send it N times because I can't keep track) is unprofessional. Email isn't about you. It's about you communicating with other people. If your way of handling email hinders that, then your way of handling email is broken. Now, if other people are seeking free, unsolicited help from you, then yes, expecting you to have your email set up to work for their email is... unreasonable.
    • hombre_fatal 4y ago
      Dunno, this thread really puts words in people's mouths. TFA is about the fact that emails fall through the cracks and that following up is a good idea. This can even happen to work emails, but I don't think any of the examples in the blog post are work related. Whether the receiver has a catastrophic organization failure or whether it's a one-off accident doesn't seem relevant to me beyond couching some lectures in these threads to hypothetical people: in either case it is a better assumption to go "I should follow up" vs "there must be a reason they never got back to me, so I won't." This is good advice beyond email. Dating is another place this comes up. It serves you better to politely follow up than to assume someone is avoiding you the second it may seem like it. Meanwhile, "Oh, she got distracted and never responded?! Pfft, well she should get more organized if she wants to talk to me!" is kind of the vibes I get from this thread. While that's fine, to be clear, you may also be missing out if that is your default mode.
    • SoftTalker 4y ago
      Back when professional communication consisted of memos and letters on paper, it was reasonable to expect a recipient to read most or all of them (even then, departmental/company-wide memos sometimes fell through the cracks) because it was much harder to physically produce and send an overwhelming volume to any one person and there was a real financial cost to doing it. Email is fundamentally broken in the volume of messaging it allows at no costs. All inbox schemes, filters, auto-categories, etc. are just band-aids on the fundamental problem. Charge the sender something close to a first-class postage stamp for each email sent, and you'll see email get productively useful.
• mjr00 4y ago
  You're completely missing the power dynamic the article is talking about. You don't send a track to a record label's A&R and then dismissively say "they're not worth my time" when they don't respond. You don't contact VCs asking for a coffee meeting to pitch your startup idea and say "your inbox management sucks, not worth my time" if they don't get back to you in three days. This is about getting the attention of someone who is very busy and would likely doing you a favor (or buying something from you, or investing in you).
  • NikolaNovak 4y ago
    Agreed - I think a lot of responses in this thread get it exactly right. The assumption from the OP is that they are in position of power (however defined), and that "it's no skin off their back" if somebody's request is missed. They have the luxury to adopt a (to others seemingly) random and specific uncommunicated threshold, and enforce it. That is true, in a very specific subset of cases and situations. That is empathically not true, in a very large set of cases and situations. If you are the one sending the email, then typically you are the one that wants/needs something, ergo you are typically the one that is responsible to get it done / follow-up. That's a generalization but a useful one. (In particular, the notion of "if you follow up several times, you're going into kill file" is again only applicable for a very specific set of situations. Your boss, client, spouse, friend, partner, lover, lawyer, parole officer, tax auditor, teacher, et cetera would probably not react kindly to enforcement of such rule).
    • ormaaj 4y ago
      It's not a power thing.
      • NikolaNovak 4y ago
        Disagree, or at least we are misunderstanding each other. I am not saying you are gleefully abusing power or going ona power trip. I am saying there's implicit power in your suggestion / preference. If you work for a large company, you don't get to put your boss in a kill file because they emailed you a few follow ups. There's any number of situations where that's an unthinkable option. Consciously or not, you are assuming position of power over the sender. That you don't need them and you aren't negatively impacted by enforcing arbitrary and draconian thresholds. As I said in my examples, most of us likely would not be that non chalant in situations where we do not have the power.
• mediaman 4y ago
  That's an interesting approach. When I did my first startup, I landed my first seven figure deal because I'd done the research to know someone needed my product. But they were too busy to respond. I regularly followed up over six months by both email and phone. I knew they needed it. But I also know that people tend to prioritize their days by what fires are burning and need to be put out. Eventually I bothered them enough that they realized they should do something to get me to go away. I guess I became the fire they needed to put out. Only then did they actually process anything I'd sent enough to realize it was something their Fortune 500 client actually did need, and that they'd look great by proposing it. They wound up being my biggest client and helped make my startup profitable. I could have said: Mr. Potential Client, I'll send you one email. If you don't configure your mail filters and organize your workflow properly, well, "fuck off." If I did, I wouldn't have likely gotten any of my clients. Then I could explain the outcomes to my investors: "Well, I sent them an email. They failed to read it!" The point is that if you want to persuade other people to see things your way, your approach doesn't survive first contact with reality. That's OK: your job may not be that, and it probably works just fine if you only deal with incoming requests. There's just going to be a limit to what you can do.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • hopevillian 4y ago
    sounds like survivor bias
    • CallMeJim 4y ago
      Sounds like common sense.
    • caminante 4y ago
      Not even that. This anecdote is a simple cost-benefit play. Playing the lottery makes sense with certain odds.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• spoonjim 4y ago
  This is more about situations where one person would benefit from the relationship and the other person couldn’t care less. You think Travis Kalanick cares if someone pitching him says “he’s not worth my time?” But that person benefits a lot from his response.
• qwertywert_ 4y ago
  I agree but also touch some grass.
• jimmySixDOF 4y ago
  Email pollution is a real thing. Any meaningful conversation between 4 people has cc going at least 1 if not 2 levels up. Apply that at scale and I have seen Directors with hundreds of conversation threads each day. There is a duty for them to be in-the-loop as in notified, but if you place an action item for them in an email and expect them to respond to your pressing concern of the day without some out of band followup to to flag that particular email, then protip: don't tick it off your highly optimized workflow when you hit send.
  • mordae 4y ago
    This is why intra-org comms should go through something like Zulip. It is easy for others to follow asynchronously and posts tend to get automatically categorized by senders if people responsible for channels yell at people to categorize properly in the first couple weeks until it becomes a second nature for everybody. Old topics just die and dive deep in the menu, waiting to be resurrected by automatic suggestions when someone tries to invent a name for a topic. Everyone sees where the need to catch up and they can easily dismiss channels where they follow just a single topic or so.
  • JamesSwift 4y ago
    Then that person needs to coach offenders, and senders need to be explicit/clear when something is an action item vs an FYI. If that Director is truly needing to be in the loop and take action on so much email that they cant keep up then there needs to be a person hired to manage that.
• HWR_14 4y ago
  > Sending multiple such "did you get my email?" followups will land you in the kill file. Since you have distinct rules about communicating with you, and believe in organizing your workflow, I assume you have something that autofires when someone first reaches out to you explaining the rules? Or do you expect them to live up to your communication standards that are not in alignment with the industry standards? > protip: I whitelist signed Real protip: Protips are supposed to be generally applicable. Unless you're Mark Cuban or PG or similar, "protip, here's how best to get in touch with me" is just misusing the phrase.
  • caminante 4y ago
    > Or do you expect them to live up to your communication standards that are not in alignment with the industry standards? The parent IS talking about standards by saying: i. If you miss an email because you don't manage your inbox, then it's not my job to follow-up. ii. If I don't respond to an email, then don't expect a response. Of course, there are exceptions [to the standards] if you need to follow-up with your CEO or if your mom calls.
    • ormaaj 4y ago
      Yes. Email on the internet is still best-effort delivery after all. If someone suspects an email somehow didn't get delivered that's a whole different situation. Whether or not a response is expected depends on whether the respondee made their expectation clear, if it isn't implicitly clear given context. Otherwise response is at the discretion of the responder. Like duh right? I'm remarking for the benefit of those that haven't yet had much exposure to discourse particularly among computing professionals on the internet. Expect for people to vary in their expectations, but this attitude of entitlement, expecting others to "earn" their attention is completely back-to-front. That burns people every time, and they're usually oblivious to it happening.
  • ormaaj 4y ago
    I'm speaking specifically to and from the perspective of what I expect to be the majority of HN readership - those deeply involved with matters concerning the technology space. So no, what I said isn't applicable to the wider readership of this blogger, that would be mere "best practice". But I think most readers here don't need to be clued in about what constitutes protip-ness.
• Kiro 4y ago
  You forgot to mention your best filter for not getting a flooded inbox: being a hostile person.
  • rnk 4y ago
    Ha, perfect. That person is so angry and entitled to say f-off if you don't do what I say.
    • ormaaj 4y ago
      I think people don't read replies. :/
• philosopher1234 4y ago
  Good for you. Enjoy not being able to contact busy people like Travis Kalanick. I don't want to contact him, personally, but your argument is delusional and unadaptive.
• simonw 4y ago
  If you refuse to interact with anyone who hasn't managed to build good email habits you're going to miss out on interacting with a lot of interesting people.
• kodah 4y ago
  > It is _your_ responsibility to configure your mail filters and use your tools to organize your workflow in such a way that you do not miss important emails. Your failure to do so is your own failure. If you fail to see my email because you have a laughably amateaurish gmail-based workflow consisting of a single 100k-message inbox, then please, kindly fuck off. You're not worth my time. The notion that a message "must not be important because they only sent one" is absolutely hilarious! I do this and still miss emails. Checking my email is mixed in with other activities and inputs in my daily life: - Coding - Scheduled meetings - Unscheduled meetings - Organizing the team - Providing support for customers - Responding to chat messages - Responding to emails I've had people try to moralize my inbox, the way you did here, and when I tried to think of ways to make it better I realized the only way for me to do that is to subtract from other activities. Personally, I think your take is fairly selfish, but mainly because you moralized it - and to the degree with which you did, not because you're advocating filters. Personally, I'd suggest taking a step back and thinking about that communication is the result of a system of incentives. You can't moralize/pressure people into adhering to your preferred communication. It's about finding somewhere that someone can be reached and being persistent enough to reach them.
• rnk 4y ago
  That's a very hostile attitude. Other people will have opposite ways to find important email, "important people" to you might not know about your special way to be connected. Your way is not the only way.
• metacritic12 4y ago
  Wait, the OP is clearly describing a case where the sender is much lower on a power dynamic and trying to meet a much higher person, like a CEO of a unicorn. The CEO of a unicorn absolutely has no responsibility to configure her mailbox so that randos can ask for advice in a way that grabs her attention. She does have the responsibility to configure her inbox so she doesn't miss board emails though!
• vecter 4y ago
  This is entirely unrealistic and totally detached from reality. Someone like Travis Kalanick simply cannot reply to everyone who emails him. He literally wouldn't have enough time to do that if he just replied to emails 24/7/365, along with the work associated with replying to those emails, which is often way more than the time to write a response. The truth is, most people don't value your time because you don't deserve their time. I don't mean this in a moralistic or judgmental way. It's just reality--they don't know you. If I emailed Mark Cuban, the President of the United States, or Jeff Bezos and they didn't respond to me, that doesn't make them conceited jerks who "aren't worth my time" and it doesn't make me any less of a human being. There's no need to get emotional or moralistic about this. When it comes to trying to get in touch with someone whose attention is valuable, it's best to put your ego aside. If you're talking about someone who in theory "should" respond to you (a coworker that you have a dependency on, for example), what you said makes more sense. But the conclusion of "they're not worth my time" because they missed your email or forgot to respond to it is ludicrous. Imagine your colleague emailed you, and because you're a busy person, you didn't respond (I'm sure that's happened at least once in your life). Then later they told you to "kindly fuck off" as they passed you in the hallway. How ridiculous would that be?
• roflyear 4y ago
  Yeah. This: send him an email send him a follow up a few days later then send another follow up like a week later and then one more follow up just for good measure Now means that guy has fucking 4x+ of every fucking email! Wow!