Email – love it or hate it? It’s very useful and I need it, but more and more I am coming to dislike it. Marketers have ruined it – filling up my inbox with time-wasting junk. I can’t seem to get spam filters to work well enough.
Enough of my rant…I have come to understand that there are two kinds of people. Lightnings and Laggards.
“Lightnings” are those that have desk jobs and can see emails and respond to them fast. I email some of them and it’s like texting them – they respond right away. Of course, not everyone with a desk job is that fast. Some are engrossed in other work, but they still tend to respond quickly. Junk emails are eliminated in real-time with a simple click. You see them in the cafeteria when you are getting coffee and they can converse with you about an email you sent to them four minutes ago.
Then there is another group, the one I fall into – the Laggards. Don’t let the name fool you – these people may be incredibly productive, just not via fast email exchanges. These people work in the field, or away from their desks (maybe they don’t have a desk) and are doing projects with atoms and not so much electrons. Maybe they are in sales or production or service and/or are driving a lot. They don’t have their inbox open all day ready to pounce on the next message. (Yes, they have smartphones – haha). Junk emails fill up their inbox, mixing in with and obscuring the important emails with their multitude of distractions. Laggards get buried. And when they finally do sit down and open their inbox to try to catch up, (which could be at 9pm on Sunday) they get discouraged about how many emails are there waiting for them.
People in this group get asked “Did you get my email?”, then Laggards ask “When did you send it?”, and a response may be “this morning”. Laggards are thinking “No, I didn’t see it, I’ve been working!”
Anybody understand what I’m saying?
Understand which group your recipient is in – what their work is like. If you want to be sure to communicate quickly with Laggards, maybe a text or phone call will be faster.
Yes, yes, YES!! I’M a LAGGARD!! So happy to learn I’m not the only one. You nailed this exactly!
Larry – you nailed it! Email – uuuggg. It is so useful and useless. What a tine sink! Not sure what the solution is. Thinking about starting over w a new email. Thanks for your great messages each day. Have a fantastic day!
I talk about this often with my sales team. There are too many ways to communicate today. Phone, email, text, messenger, chat, IM, etc. I feel as though technology has actually slowed the way we communicate on a 1 to 1 basis, or even in small groups.
I enjoy your daily emails, Larry.
I don’t feel that email was designed as storage. I view it like a physical mailbox. I clean out the physical mailbox daily. I do the same with my emails.
I use folders too. I have a folder for everything I need to keep. I am quick to delete and block spam. Most every email platform makes it super easy to delete and unsubscribe with a click.
I have a junk email address that I have maintained for 26 years. That is the email address that I use for times I don’t want to use my “real” email address. This email address is separate from my primary work email, and my primary private/personal email.
I love email for its simplicity. Plus, its time and date stamped. Plus, I can always go back and see what I said in an email. It’s a record of a conversation. Most people don’t write long meandering emails because of the effort it takes. The benefit of that is they get to the point quicker than they would on a phone call. Some people talk on the phone all day and call that work. We have all witnessed those that think they are being productive but are really just talking on the phone while other team members are doing the work.
Email, if used properly, is one of the greatest tools we have at our disposal in my opinion. It’s how I get your daily messages. I can spot it quickly because of the daily discipline of eliminating the noise from the empty hats. (Spam button or Unsubscribe – Done)
Respectfully,
– Lightening User
Guilty !!
I am a Laggard all the way !
Email is so useful but at the same time it is a ball & chain.
Recently I have changed my auto reply to say (basically) if you need a reply within a few days call me. Do not expect a prompt reply to your email.
Back before email regular mail was the issue. I used to travel for business a lot and I had my wife toss all my mail in a drawer. Once a month i pulled the drawer out to my desk and tossed the junk mail in the trash, sorted the bills, paid them and was done for the month. I worked great !!
I am both! If it a designated time for me to be doing email, I am a Lightening (if at a glance it seems to be important/urgent). However, if I am busy with something else, that gets my focus and I am then I am an email Laggard. Email can be cumbersome but if you quickly sort by sender (example: Larry, Mark and Mike get my attention) and then by received time, you can see if something is immediately looks urgent. Due the the vast amount of emailing done lately, as people still work remotely, I also designate email time at least twice a day. I still junk list senders as our filter also only captures so much.
100% laggard. Sorry not sorry.
*shrugs*
Max is spot on. There is very few reasons that one cant get organized to the point that their email can be effective. Even less reasons one cannot respond in 2 hours ( in field or not) and exactly zero reasons that one cannot respond daily .
If one is getting that many emails, your interacting with too many people and not delegating enough.
Lets figure out how we “Can” do something and not how we “Can’t”
Sincerely,
Former installer, service and sales guy who checked his emails/ texts multiple times a day
Spot on! If you’re sitting at a desk it may still be an improvement to keep email alerts off and use a winning schedule to handle this task…possibly still a win for owning your time rather than everyone else owning it.
True! Lightning here, but trying to not let everyone think they can get my immediate attention at any moment in time. My dad carries an inbox with tens of thousands of unreads. I see the huge badge icon on his phone. Laggard to the max.
I am laggard, I read your blog every morning and then get to work away from my desk and stay at it all day. Most of the time at the end of the day I Don`t chime in to your blog because I feel like it is to late and nobody will read it. I really appreciate your Blogs every day and try to share it as much as possible.
Thank you
You described me perfectly, I am a laggard.
It’s funny, I had an employee who was very upset about people not responding to his emails quickly and wanted me to “do something about it”. I explained the same thing you are pointing out, that not everyone has a desk job and can respond within minutes or hours.
When I initiate a relationship with a client, I ask them how they prefer their communication; email, text, phone, or for some things, mail. I note that in my file and make sure that I follow their direction. Sometimes it varies by the degree of urgency and for the very urgent, some give me their personal cell phone number.
Max B is spot on!!!!!!!
All Great Replies tho. I did always wonder what other people thought of it.
I’m a Lightning. On our team, in order to provide WOW! Service, we must have a quick response time. It’s always nice to hear how impressed someone is about how fast we were responding to their email. “Wow, I just hit send!”
Third group: Lightening with the email they want to respond to and intentionally (and unintentionally) Laggard on the rest. Also, following suggestions from productivity people, email delegation is a great thing. Just as you delegate other tasks, delegate email. If you don’t like responding to email and it takes you from other essential work, then delegate it.
I am a lightning with work’s emails because I delegate and prioritize them . However, I am a laggard with 1,000 emails on my personal email. Most of the time is the services that I subscribed but I have to play catch up on weekends and deleted a bunch of them because they sent 2-3 emails a day to you.