Are You a Bad Person?
David Smeigh emailed this link over to Debra and I—though Debra is quick to point out it was TO me and she was only CC’d—saying it reminded him of us.
I send 160 emails a day. Am I a bad person?
Of course reading this article forced me to go back and take a look at my email habits, which I sometimes feel can be a bit obscene. Take Monday of this week (and I should point out this week has not been one of the busiest in recent memory), I sent 55 emails between 9a and 5p. That’s significantly more than the InformationWeek blogger, but I only had a total of 107 recipients, averaging only about 2 recipients per note.
Not sure what all this tells us, but it is a bit interesting to evaluate the extent to which we are clogging up our colleague’s emailboxes… I think I’m okay.
Matt, At least you do not email the entire Dow Jones with a question that went through the county email….. Our IT department was doing a survey through the entire network (3000+ network accounts) on “MS ACCESS” and someone ask back what is “MS”. This individual used the “reply to all” button and everyone in the county started answering and used the “reply to all”…the emails got a bit nasty after the volume started to grow.
So the question that comes to mind is… What is the maximum number of people you have ever emailed with a single email? Would this not shift the curve?
Carl
Carl, good information, and I have (a very few times) carelessly pressed the easy-to-press “Reply to All”. (I have seen it at work, the “Reply to All” saying don’t Reply to All, and the Reply to All pointing out a problem with that, and … Did you say nasty? Maybe the “Reply to All” button is a candidate for one of those annoying but occasionally needed Are you sure? messages — especially if future smart e-mail programs could count how many Alls there are.
Matthew, your low . . . uh . . . Sendees-to-Messages Ratio suggests that you are using e-mail in a focused way, thinking about your “cc” list enough to turn e-mails into actual communications. Offhand, I would not call you a bad person.
Your mother has had a lot of multiple sendings in recent years when she was prayer-chain coordinator, and continues to have some as a key communicator among the Browns and Ellsworths. A lot has to do with your matrix of role expectations — did I do the words right?
Interesting article and responses.
Interesting…
…of course, the worst thing about the growth of e-mail is how distracting that little chime can be when a new e-mail lands in our inboxes. This comes back to that article you found a while ago which suggests we’re getting dumber due to the constant interruptions at work and information overload. I’m convinced that I was more productive before e-mail and the internet, but it’s impossible to put the genie back in the bottle now. We all need e-mail, or we’re out of the loop (as cc’s prove). I guess we’ll just have to try harder. Dan’s ‘are you sure?’ question for ‘reply to all’ could extend to cc’s (‘do you have to include everyone in this message?’…
Actually Matt, that was “you” in its singular form. My email habits go like this: if I want to address someone directly I put them in the to line, the cc line is merely to inform someone, keep them “in the loop” as it were.
