I hate email. It’s a monster, and right now it’s a HUGE monster for me. I’m just surfacing from the longest leave I’ve ever taken from work. I was heavily medicated until late last week and choose to be ‘completely off’ rather than working from home. I’ve never done that before. I’ve always worked while away, and did my best to keep up. But the medication was enough that I lacked judgement and knew better than to try and communicate (or even drive). So, as I look to return to work this week, I see that I have 840 unread emails. That would have been larger if I hadn’t peeked at a few (hundred) along the way, but I never once tried very much Now it’s time.
I know that hundreds will be ones I can just delete. I know that some will be informational and I can read and delete, or file away. I know that some will be ‘ball drops’ where I should have read and followed up with days or even weeks ago, although I did have an auto-response to contact the office. And I know it will take longer than this week to get through them all.
What I hope happens is that most of them are just destined for the delete folder and I can see just how unimportant email is compared to everything else I need to do at work. My direct team that I work with communicate with me on Microsoft TEAMS and they have been very respectful of me being away… so there won’t be a lot there that is overly urgent, especially with a very competent leader assisting while I was away. So, I’ll pick away at it, starting tomorrow. Today I joined my team online for a Pro-D session and then after a short nap I joined my PAC meeting remotely as well. My eyes are blurry and it’s off to bed early tonight. Hopefully the email monster will be tamed by early next week.
I feel for you, David. I certainly lived in that world for four years as a school technology director. I relish my relative lack of attention demanding emails that I have now, in my fourth year to return to the classroom and full-time teaching. I wonder to what degree AI tools are going to help us with this? It really is kind of remarkable that email, a technology we were so excited to have for the first time in the late 1990s, has become such a drain on our productivity and our cognitive loads. It sounds like you’re dealing mainly with messages that require direct responses, but if you have not tried sanebox.com, you might give it a try. I’ve been using it on my personal account for many years now and really like it. It helps process promotional, spam, and newsletter. emails well.
Thanks Wesley, I’ll check out sanebox.com for my personal gmail… after I get through the next 5 weeks of school:)
As a working parent, I have an email for personal, email for work, and a junk/coupon email. Then besides text messages, there are the messaging apps for work, sports teams, scouts, etc etc. Oh and I teach all day with 45’min to plan, grade, contact parents, copy, run reports, and check emails. Ready to go off the grid. 🙄🤦♀️
Michelle, I totally get it. I didn’t even share that I have 13,500+ unread emails in my GMail. The difference is that I’m not trying to get that to zero. All the best for a positive end to the year!