Saturday, March 14, 2009

You’ve Got Mail

Do you have e-mail fatigue? I do.

Everyday, in the office, I am bombarded with loads of e-mail, so much so that I don’t bother to read each and every of them in details. Quite often I only read the first paragraph.

Feeding the e-mail overload is a practice to “acknowledge e-mail”. Consider this case:

The boss sends an e-mail to April, May, June, Julius and Augustus, telling them that he would be off the following day. All the recipients click “Reply All”, enter “Noted”, and click the Send button.

So, there are six e-mails flying around.


My personal e-mail account is also flooded with messages, many of them come from Buddhist groups. Another case:

Buddhist Group A sends an e-mail to the secretary of Buddhist Group B. The mail is about the upcoming talks by a renowned monk. The secretary is so “compassionate” that she helps to forward it. I am in the mailing list of both groups, so I get two copies of the same e-mail.

I have asked these Buddhist groups to set up their web pages and update their activities from there. Somehow, the people responsible are still more comfortable with e-mail…

7 comments:

  1. I have to acknowledge it's actually bad. One of the barriers to effective communication is message overload, this is an example of it.

    Hence I don't like to subscribe to emails unless I think it's useful. Just bookmarking the page is enough.

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  2. im ok with emails as long as they are related and directed to me but not those "nvm, just cc him along" kind of email.

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  3. i hate forwarded emails
    i don't bother to read them and i select all and delete right away...

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  4. hahha i got loads of it
    all ISSUES!

    sometimes I can receive 50 emails in the morning just to ask about loads of issues.....

    I feel so dizzy during lunch time after attending to each and everyone of them!

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  5. I just dump forwarded emails to a dedicated folder in my Outlook... for future viewing when i am free. Now it has thousands of emails already. haha.

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  6. I love getting mail! Especially if it's related to my work. :-)

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  7. I've got over 600 unread emails accumulated from last 2 months!! I think I'll just delete all! : )

    ReplyDelete