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Email Overload - Not At My Desk All Day
illuscat | Mar 26 2007
My problem is with communication. I'm an academic teaching at two different schools and working another job directing an educational program. I have three different workplaces and no office (except at home). Between my different roles, I get a lot of email and a good deal of voicemail in a given week. During the workday, I'm often in the classroom, in transit, or in seclusion, trying to get papers graded (I teach writing). Because of this, I'm admittedly hard to reach. I feel terrible for making people wait for my responses, and I worry that it causes my professional reputation to suffer, but unless I ignore my other duties, I just can't devote an hour or more each day to getting that inbox to empty. This is complicated by the fact that many things in my inbox are requests I might have to say no to. How do I respond to the 12th student this week to ask for a last-minute letter of recommendation when deep down, I know I don't have the time to do it? The result is that my email has become an unhappy, guilt-ridden place to visit, reminding me of all the people who probably think I have some somehow failed them. Then, even when I do have time, I just don't want to go there... Any suggestions? 10 Comments
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 Email is one of the...Submitted by msanford on April 6, 2007 - 8:12am.
Unstuffed;8734 wrote:
Email is one of the hardest things to manage, for a bunch of reasons. One of them is the expectation that we'll respond instantly. No-one, except maybe your close family, is entitled to have immediate access to you at any hour of the day or night. There are several folks who say that they deliberately keep their response time around one day, so that people will stop expecting immediate answers. Indeed. I was plagued by colleagues a while back who expected, and at times, demanded immediate access to me any time it suited them. In my field (academia), there is generally no need for that, aside from last-minute publishing or grant proposal problems. Some of them were my equals or even my subordinates, and that was something I worked actively to eradicate using the deliberately-long-response-time method. Unstuffed;8734 wrote:
And if you only check your email twice a day, you're saving yourself a whole bunch of time already. This, though, caused organizational problems for me because I do get a fair bit of email and I have a habit of leaving my mail client (Mail.app) running all the time. I would lose track of which emails I had dealt with since I would often read one and then forget about it... » POSTED IN:
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