“But it’s just about better email and the way we engage with it.”
“I think there’s a lot of advice out there blaming technology and how we should use less email or none at all-that it’s the fault of technology and we’re not to blame,” says Bohns. So stop with the calls to kill email-we’re the problem, not inboxes. “And on my side, it helps me because I know I’m not infringing on other people’s time.” Bohns agrees, saying it helps reduce pressure-though she admits that, as an inbox-zero person, she still can’t resist wanting to clear her messages. “I have received some feedback where people say it eases their mind to see that note,” Giurge says. “She labels everything as not urgent.”Īnd those receiving her emails say they appreciate it. “Laura said she never gets low-priority emails, but I get them from one person: her,” Bohns says. While Giurge has never received an email from anyone marked as low priority, Bohns has-from Giurge herself. “Maybe we’re a little bit afraid of doing that-but if we’re not doing it, we’re not protecting each other’s boundaries,” she says. “We are very good at indicating when things are urgent, with all caps and red exclamation points,” says Bohns, adding that we need a green exclamation point to show something isn’t urgent, that it can be answered asynchronously in our own time.īut when has anyone ever marked an email as low priority? Giurge says it’s possible to do so in Outlook, but she’s never seen anyone use that tool, perhaps because senders don’t want to suggest their work isn’t important. Some email clients have ways to label a message as requiring immediate followup or being of high priority-we need to do the same with messages that are low priority.
“Simply make the implicit expectations explicit by adding a line to make it clear this is not an urgent response,” she says. Giurge advises making use of subject lines by clearly labelling an email with “read this later” or “not urgent,” letting the receiver relax. There may be a simpler solution: just say your message isn’t urgent. “But what we found is that senders who are unintentionally violating those boundaries can become more aware of their email behavior.” “A lot of the research before has focused on the person who holds the bias, the receivers who overestimate expectations,” says Giurge. Because of that, changing how we use email isn’t down to recipients, but senders. But not everyone can withstand the feeling we must always be available. Some of us may have the mental strength to resist that pressure and that email notification ping, perhaps setting specific times to check email a handful of times each day. “The less we’re bound to physical spaces to work, the less we have safe spaces where we don’t work.” “It’s not like I leave the office, work can come at any point throughout the day,” she says. That feeling has worsened during the pandemic, with fewer physical barriers to work, Bohns says, pointing to the rise of burnout among employees amid lockdown. “As a receiver, you’re just so concerned with other people’s expectations, of what they might think if you don’t get back to them right away-that you’re not dedicated or don’t care or not paying attention-that we’re really concerned with being responsive,” says Giurge. A sender may not even want a quick response-not least if it means they have work to do-but when that message lands in your inbox, it’s suddenly on your to-do list.