Tag Archives: email

Time off stress

It’s accumulating. The work I need to get done is compounding as I take some time off. I’ve been taking some high strength meds and my mind is not always clear. Meanwhile email and work accumulates.

I’ll have to spend time catching up today even though I won’t be going into work today. I’m adjusting to the meds, I’m feeling more discomfort than pain, and I hopefully won’t sleep away the day like I did yesterday.

It’s challenging missing work, and impossible to let work go enough to take a day off without thinking about what I’m missing and what I need to do. It sometimes feels like it’s more work to take time off than it is to go to work while not feeling my best. My body is getting the rest it needs, my mind is just getting stressed about everything I’ve got to get done at work… and the email just keeps coming faster than I can deal with.

It’s really hard to take sick days completely off, work adds too much stress to time off.

Time for a break

It’s the last day before March Break and it’s going to be a long day. My final ‘to do’ list is quite big and my goal is to get it done and not take it into the break. Sometimes these holidays sneak up on me, like this one. Other times I am counting down the days. But despite the fact that this two-week holiday seemed to come so quickly this year, I can tell that I need a break.

It’s a reset for me. A chance to rest my aching back. A chance to listen to a fictional novel. An opportunity to visit my parents. And most importantly, a chance to switch work off for a little bit. The last semester of school from March to June is always a whirlwind of non-stop activity and this break is the preparation for it.

My brain won’t totally let work go on this break, but unlike a weekend, I will be able to go a couple straight days without thinking about work. I’ll put my vacation response on email, and I’ll not be checking email daily. I used to not do this, but over the years I’ve realized that when I actually let myself take a break, I come back more rejuvenated and ready for the homestretch.

So while I’ve got a long day ahead of me, I hope to leave work at work and take some time completely off this holiday. The test of this will be my daily writing… how much of it will show that work is still on my mind? We’ll know in a couple weeks!

Email Fail

I think email is broken.

1. Spam – it’s not just annoying, it’s dangerous and people are scammed all the time. Sometimes you just need to click a link and you are in trouble. I’ve seen stats ranging from 45-84% of all email being spam. While spam filters might block a lot of this, too much still gets through.

2. Unsubscribe – how many things have you not subscribed to that you have to unsubscribe from? And sometimes the unsubscribe process is the way that spammers know they have a working email and so they target you more. I’ve resorted to ‘block sender’ to unsubscribe from subscriptions that I didn’t sign up for.

3. Unsolicited invitations – worse still is the follow-up, “I don’t know if you saw my first email.” I take the time to block sender when I get these. I don’t owe you a reply when I don’t know you and you cold call me through email. I didn’t miss your email, I wasn’t interested the first time, and I’m just annoyed the second.

4. “Thank you.” – You want to thank me, please do so by not sending me an email thank you. Thank you’s are very polite in conversation, they are just another email adding to my inbox when sent digitally. I know this sounds cranky, but unless you are sending me a hilarious gif that says in some way, ‘Hey, I was so thankful I found this to make you smile’, then save yourself the effort and just don’t reply with a ‘Thanks’.

5. Reply All – Hitting Reply All should require effort, such as a double check to make you think about it:

It is way too easy to Reply All, and this is used far too often. Whenever possible, I blind cc emails when they go to a lot of people and might solicit a Reply All. Sometimes I wish Reply All wasn’t even an option. For the amount of times I’ve used it, I would still be saving time if I had to type everyone’s email in to reply to all, but then also avoided receiving so many in my inbox because it was equally hard for everyone else to send them.

6. Email doesn’t stop – I have a vampire rule for email that I follow: Unless someone that works for me asks a question or needs my help (invites me in), then I’m not allowed to enter their inbox on weekends or after 6pm on a work day. It is annoying how many steps/clicks it takes to delay an email delivery until the next morning, but I’ll do it to avoid sending someone an email when they won’t be dealing with it until the next work day anyway. I rather inconvenience myself than add work to people at or after dinner or on their weekends. Even if I’m sharing a useful resource, it can wait until the next morning. I wish more people did this. If someone wants to think about work on their time off, it should be because they want to, not because a work email came in to interrupt them at home.

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In a blog post titled Finding Balance, that I wrote over 8 years ago, I created and shared the image above and I said,

“Email is not a productivity tool. It is a poorly used form of communication that engulfs productivity time and requires a disproportionate amount of our lives.”

In the past 8 years I haven’t seen any innovation in email and it still hinders more than helps productivity. Currently I use Microsoft Teams with my work teams and tell them that I will check messages there before email. At least this tool lets me contextualize the messages and so prioritizing my teams is easier than looking at the most recent email that has come in. But email still sucks too much of my time for the value that it does (and mostly does not) return.

Essentially, email has failed, and I would love to see it go away in the same way the fax machine did.

Spam and the end of my contact form

I’ve had a contact form on my blog since 2007. For the last few years, this has only been used to spam me: ‘Improve your SEO’; ‘I notice the content of this page and think you’d like to backlink to us… we’ll pay you’; ‘Would you like to become a distributor for…’; and even; ‘I’m horny’ with a link to some porn, dating, or mail order bride site. I can’t remember the last time someone used it to actually contact me for any legitimate reason.

Instead of deleting my contact page, I just deleted the contact form, and the first line on the page is:

Would you like to contact me? Great! I’m @datruss on Twitter. You can also leave a comment on my daily blog, “Daily-Ink“.

Hopefully I don’t drive spammers to my blog, in which case I’ll have to change that too. It’s a shame that there is so much spam that I need to do this. I’ve read that as much as 85% of all email is spam. I think responses to contact forms would be much higher than that.

I wish there was a way to spam spammers such that their job became unmanageable. Instead of them filling our inboxes with a waste of time and energy, we should figure out a way to send them ‘smart’ spam back. If they want a back link from my site, they get hundreds of responses from hundreds of fake email addresses saying, ‘Yes I’ll add a back link to your blog’ and linking to other spammer’s websites and fake PayPal accounts. Drown them in so many fake but positive responses that they can’t determine what’s worth pursuing and what’s not.

Spam the spammers.

Without a definitive attack on their livelihood, they don’t have an incentive to stop.

But for now, they win… no more contact form from me. Fortunately, I’m pretty easy to get a hold of on social media and here on my Daily-Ink, and so while removing my contact form won’t affect people’s ability to connect with me, it will reduce how much spam comes my way.

Holiday message

After sharing our Superintendent’s holiday message attachment, and the link to find the latest district pandemic response, this was my holiday message from the principal that I sent out yesterday:

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Beyond our control:

It’s was a bit hard today to hear that new restrictions are being implemented or re-implemented to deal with the Omicron variant, and that we still seem to be in pandemic rather then endemic times. In the Fall of 2020 I ruled out any recovery for 2021 and started saying, “Things will start to get better in January 2022.” Even in July of this year, as we were dealing with the Delta Variant, I wrote in my daily blog that I was still optimistic. I thought my timeline left room for error, but I was wrong. Still, while things may not be better in January, I hold a lot of optimism about what 2022 holds in store for us. I hope you do too. 

Within our control:

We all need to do our part. The holiday season is a time when families get together, and students connect with friends. We all need to do this with caution and follow the requested guidelines. When we think about the good of the greater community, we all benefit. “Be safe, be smart,” is my new mantra I share with my daughters, and I share it with you now too. Let’s all do our part.

Story time:

I wear two hats as Principal, one for Inquiry Hub and one for Coquitlam Open Learning (COL). My responsibilities for COL dominated my attention for the past couple weeks. While I was running around trying to do too many things at once, one of my teachers reminded me to ‘be present’ when I was trying to do two other things while also carrying on a conversation with the teacher. This was a good reminder for me.

I have a mentor who I was talking to, many years ago, about trying to juggle everything I was dealing with. The metaphor I used was that I keep adding things to the back of my truck, and things were starting to fall off. My mentor said, “Stuff, not people.”

“Pardon?” I asked.

He responded, “Stuff, not people. When things get really busy, and you can’t do everything, things will ‘fall off the back of your truck’. When that happens, make sure that it’s stuff, and not people.”

My teacher reminded me of this. I was trying to do many things, and in my effort, I was not attentive to the person, while I was being attentive to the ‘stuff’ I was dealing with.

At this time when we don’t have a lot of control over imposed restrictions, and doing what’s best for our community, we do have control over our own attention. Students and parents alike, when you are having a conversation, put your devices away. Have technology free meals. Play a board game instead of watching TV. Be present with each other… that’s the best gift you can give each other.

Happy holidays to you all… Be safe, be smart,

Dave

Hard to not think about it

I visited my parents for almost 2 weeks and during that time I responded to a few emails. Most of these started with some sort of, “Sorry to bother you, but…”

I responded to those because they were timely things that needed a response to move forward. But there are 70+ emails that I looked at and needed more time for me to respond and/or didn’t require immediate response. I plan on getting through these later today or tomorrow (edited, I wrote this part before I started cleaning out my garage).

It’s hard to balance truly having a holiday that feels like a holiday and also doing the work that doesn’t stop because you are on holiday. Yes, I have my ‘I’m away from the office’ auto reply on. Yes, it gives a phone number to contact for assistance. Still, I feel obligated to catch up and clear out my inbox ever since I’ve kind of let it go a bit while visiting my parents.

What’s a little unusual is how long I’ve left this over the past couple weeks. Part of it is the need to have a real holiday after the year that was. But I juggle this with wanting to deal with it before it becomes a huge task. And I’m also wanting to enjoy the holiday time ahead. That said, despite letting my email correspondence slip while away, I know the email is there. I’ve read the subject headings, and I’ve felt the pressure to get to it. It’s hard not to think about it and so it’s better to just get it done rather than let it fester in my head as something needing my attention.

Times like this, while on holiday, I sometimes wish for a 9-5 job that doesn’t require any work coming home. I’d probably have less holiday time, but that holiday time would be completely work and work email free. Then I remember the satisfaction I get at work helping students and teachers, and I know that I’d probably hate leaving this job for a 9-5’er.

By tomorrow afternoon I’ll have my un-dealt-with email count down, and I will think less about it for a while. But I don’t know how to turn it completely off, and I don’t know how to see it there and not let it bug me in some small but significant way. I think that I need to take at least a week this summer where I don’t look at email at all… but somehow although I did a couple weeks with no social media that went well, I don’t think it will be as stress free to do with email.

Scams and spam

It’s unreal how much spam comes our way. Recorded phone calls and emails that get by our spam filters, trying to get our attention or steal information or money.

Occasionally, I enjoy watching videos of people wasting the time of a scammer. They let them control a virtual and empty computer after 30 minutes of delays, or even fool the scammers and take over their computers. I like the idea of distant scammers doing bad things to good people being punished in some way. Especially since these scammers tend to take advantage of the elderly and vulnerable.

But that’s minimal entertainment compared to the damage they do; the hurt they cause. It seems to me that they undermine trust in a way that is harmful to society. They cause us to act from a standpoint of distrust as a default. They make the world more sceptical.

Email is broken. I get too much of it, and the relevance to my priorities is low. I don’t answer calls unless the number is in my phone or I’m expecting a call. But that doesn’t mean a spam call isn’t still a distraction, a thief of my attention and time. I’m not sure how, but this needs fixing. If not, I only see it getting worse.

The tone of text messages

Have you ever sent an email that was misinterpreted to be much more harsh than you intended? Have you ever missed sarcasm when it is written rather than said? Have you ever received an email that had a tone you didn’t appreciate?

Sometimes it’s not just the tone, sometimes it’s the content itself. My online teachers will sometimes get emails from students and parents that say things that would never be said to their faces. This almost always happens before there is any face-to-face or voice connection. It’s like talking through a digital screen gives people the permission to be less thoughtful. It can happen the other way too… a teacher can respond negatively to the tone they ‘hear’ in an email, and their response can be harsh in return.

Our voice has intonation that text can lack, or exaggerate, with less clarity of intent. When there is misunderstanding the easiest way to lower the tension is to move the conversation off of text. My oldest daughter did this recently. She lives in a basement suite and was having an issue with the upstairs tenant. The text exchange wasn’t going well, so m rather than continuing to text, she knocked on their door and had a conversation… it went well, when a continuation of texting would not have.

Sometimes the best response to a text message that you don’t like is not another text message. Use voice, and let the other person hear your intonation… and/or model the communication you hope to receive.

Knowhere News

After a summer of on-and-off attention to the news of our world, and our world-influencing neighbour to the south, I’m back to limiting the fire hose of information flowing my way.

My sister put me on to a weekday news email that gives me all I really need to read, beyond what might be trending on Twitter. The email subscription is to Knowhere News. It’s American focused and self-described as: “We report facts, not opinions, in our free, daily digest and share our sources so you can see for yourself.”

I’ve found few other sources that share news with less bias… that said, while the articles themselves are indeed fact focussed and shared without biased language… I’m still determining the slant with respect to which articles they choose to share.

Still, I really appreciate the links to the sources of their articles. And, in a world where information all seems comes to be from a bipolar dichotomy, it’s nice to get news that doesn’t feel like it’s coming from a sports colour commentator routing for the home team.

Related: Ideas in a Spectrum

Adopting tools in a transformative rather than additive way

Years ago I was doing a presentation to high school educators and things didn’t go as planned:

I started my presentation and within 30 seconds the power went out. I picked up my laptop and said to the 100+ audience members, “Ok, everybody gather around here.” 😉

I started a conversation about ‘What tech tool can’t you live without, that didn’t exist 5 years ago… and by the time people had discussed this with their neighbours and we started sharing as a group the power turned on… “POP” … that would be the sound of the ceiling mounted LCD light bulb burning out.

That’s when I asked a new question: “How many of you have had the experience before of having a lesson planning epiphany… suddenly you are up late at night planning… you head into the school before class starts in the morning and when you get to the photocopier… it’s BROKEN!“ ~Most teachers raised their hands.

“So, keep your hands up if you said something like, ‘That’s it, I’m never using the photocopier again?’“ ~All hands went down.

Sometimes ‘technology’, be it a photocopier, a presentation, or even a pen doesn’t work.

Other times the technology is new, and different, and not intuitively transformative. That doesn’t mean the tool can’t be transformative, it just means it’s hard to see the benefit or the value.

This afternoon a good friend and educational leader, Dave Sands, and I will be presenting to principal and vice principal colleagues. We will be sharing the value we see in using Microsoft Teams with our staff in schools.

For some people this is just one more tool to add to the list of other things they need to look at in a day… it doesn’t add value, it adds work. However Dave and I see it differently. We see how this tool can change workflow in a positive way, making it an effective way to streamline communication with different teams of people that you work with. Here are a few key points about how a tool like Microsoft Teams can be transformative:

1. It can reduce and be more efficient than email.

Have you ever shared an email that requires a response from a group of people? Some ‘Reply All’, some don’t. And you’ve got to figure out what’s what, and collate the information while responses trickle in.

Have you ever shared information with a group and one-by-one people ask the same clarifying question that you end having to respond to individually?

Have you received an email from someone that you wish you looked at sooner than you did, but instead you were dealing with 30+ other emails that came in after that?

Using Teams contextualizes conversations. It allows you to keep responses public to the team, and to clarify responses in contained conversations rather than scattered throughout email. It also allows you to prioritize your teams over the most recent items in your email inbox.

2. Using Teams creates a shared learning space within your community.

Have you ever worked as a staff on professional development, sharing paper resources that never get looked at again? Then someone shares a great resource through email, but that resource stays in your email?

My staff has created channels within a Team to work on our professional development. We co-create the notes, share files, and publicly follow through with our plans. Afterwards if someone adds anything, everyone has that resource available within the context of the learning that happened, not lost in email.

3. You are working with a team of people in other buildings and you don’t see them often.

Email is brutal for this. Conversations get scattered, supporting each other is challenging, it doesn’t feel like you are a community. When you create a Team with this group, everything is shared in one public space. When a question is asked, the whole team is there to respond, and resource sharing is easy. It shifts the environment from a broken up group into a shared community.

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That’s three quick examples of how a tool like Teams can be more effective than other tools like email, but it requires shifting practice to be truly transformative. If you are communicating with your team or staff using both Teams and email, then you are being ineffective and adding more to your plate. But if you replace communicating through email with Teams, now you have a few key advantages you didn’t have before:

  • You can actually prioritize the people within your community that you want to give your attention to by going to teams first, before dealing with the most recent and often erroneous emails at the top of your inbox.
  • Communication on Teams is public to your team, and responses are easily clarified for everyone.
  • You can embed forms where everyone can see everyone else’s responses.
  • You can easily switch to the private chat function when information becomes relevant to just one or a few people.
  • You can use the @name function to specially address a person or a whole Team.
  • You can build a sense of community and support that email does not provide.
  • Conversations are contextual. I can prioritize what I look at first, at a glance, not just by the most recent items.
  • You can reduce the amount of email you get! My email has gone down by more than 1/3 since adopting Teams.

For me the ability to prioritize my teams in a space outside of email, and reducing the amount of emails I get, have been the greatest benefits to moving to Microsoft Teams.

Note: I share expectations and etiquette with my teams about how and where to communicate. It’s a good idea with any new tool to make the intentions and expectations about how to use the tool clear. Otherwise, the tool isn’t transformative, it’s just one more shiny new thing to check, without really seeing the value in using it.

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Related: Transformative or just flashy educational tools? (Written almost a decade ago.)

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Also shared on my Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts blog