There’s a weird thing that’s happened with spam email recently. There used to be basically one kind of spam that took the form of a wildly unbelievable message that would attempt to scam your out of your money and/or infiltrate your computer: the theoretical ‘tax break’ if you send some unknown person your bank details, the fantastic news that you’ve won millions of pounds that you can claim just by clicking on this link… But then, in the last couple of years, there’s this whole other type of spam that’s emerged. These messages are different because they appear to be from a real company (maybe even from a real person) who then harrasses you to take an interest in their products or services - they’re not really spam in the traditional sense, more sales emails for things my organisation definitely doesn’t need. Here’s a couple of examples from the last two weeks:
I have reached out multiple times regarding our software engineering services (web and mobile app development). When I don’t hear back, I understand you might be busy or not interested. If you’re busy, please let me know a better time to follow up.
Did you get a chance to think about my last email? We help companies like yours beat their competitors with Google Ads. Can I show you how we do it?
These emails - at least the ones that slip through my Junk filter and actually end up in my Inbox - drive me mad. I was ranting to my partner about this recently, and he was baffled by the strength of my response. ‘Just delete them’ he said, quite rationally. ‘What’s the big deal?’
The big deal, for me, is the language they use. ‘I have reached out multiple times’. ‘Did you get a chance to think about…’. I know those phrases. I’ve used those phrases. This is what you say when you’re chasing someone up who is rubbish at replying to emails. I pride myself at being great at responding to emails - so the implication from these people that, someone, I owe them an answer and I’ve simply not delivered, really grinds my gears.
Earlier in my career, when I worked for an arts venue, I was talking to a producer at the press night party for the show he’d just produced with us. He was (humble brag alert) telling me that this venue was the best he’d ever worked at. ‘You actually reply to my emails!’ he said. I did a double take and asked if he was joking. He wasn’t. And as I went on through my career, working both in and out of venues, I saw what he meant. When you’re working with others, be that individuals in your own team, or people in a partner organisation, you get to know who replies to their emails in a timely fashion (or at all) and who doesn’t. You quickly develop a shorthand - ‘oh that person never responds to their emails, try their colleague instead’.
I have little to no respect for the ‘I don’t do emails’ school of thought, in a professional context at least. If you don’t do email, then don’t have email. If it’s a system that your organisation uses, then you need to use it. The people who are most likely to say this and get away with it are people in leadership positions - if a junior colleague simply never responded to emails, they’d probably end up with some kind of written warning. But somehow, for leaders it’s legit - people excuse it because we’re too busy, or have got more important things to do. But it leaves others in limbo, unsure of how or if they should contact us, and puts us into a separate category from our colleagues, someone too important to deal with the mundanities of getting back to people.
There is, however, a counter argument, which is that email is a nightmare. Come back from a one hour meeting and there are more messages in your inbox than there are minutes that you’ve been away. The first day of returning from holiday is a living hell of trawling through a week of threads that are no longer relevant, in search of the one or two messages that are actually important. And if, for whatever reason, we are required or choose to have our work email linked to our phone, then the pings of new arrivals literally never stops and we find ourselves pursued by our jobs 24/7.
Quite aside from the mental overload, there’s a major problem with this at a leadership level. We don’t get good at our jobs by being really good at replying to emails. We can choose to pursue Inbox Zero all day everyday, but what that means is that we are letting other people dictate what we spend our time thinking about. Leadership means looking forwards, setting the course, keeping on top of where an organisation is and where it’s heading. This can’t be done in 5 minute breaks between checking messages - this needs deep, protected time. If you’re an Artistic Director for whom part of your job is directing productions, then it’s not reasonable for you to keep on top of an inbox as well as spend five or six days per week in a rehearsal room. And for any kind of leadership role, there will be times when you need to spend two days writing a strategy, or developing a budget template, or sitting in a room with your senior team or your Board working on plans for the coming year. If you don’t do these things, then you’re not doing your job properly (although, unlike the aforementioned email avoidant junior colleague, you’re unlikely to get a written warning for it).
For some, email is also an escape, because leadership is hard and tending an inbox is, if not easy, easier. Making difficult decisions sucks, and it can be tempting to shy away from it by concentrating on the fact that you have so many messages to get back to, so many people who need to hear from you that you don’t want to let down. But our difficult decision hasn’t disappeared, and, despite our prayers to the leadership gods, there’s no one else coming to make it for us.
We can’t get around the fact that email, for most companies, exists - although, as Cal Newport describes in his enticingly titled book A World Without Email, there are alternatives for those bold enough to try something different. But for the rest of us, we can’t pretend it’s not there, and nor can we be a slave to it - so we simply have to manage it. I like to think of email as an energetic toddler - it’s basically great, but if we’re not going to be completely beholden to its whims, it really really needs some boundaries. What that looks like is going to be different for each person - maybe it’s no email Fridays, or (my preferred method) a clear block of email time scheduled every day, after which I can move on and work on other things. My best and boldest email boundary was when I went on maternity leave and set up a rule that deleted every message that hit my inbox during the dates that I was away, with a corresponding out of office that told the sender that their email had been deleted and they could either resend it to my maternity cover or they could resend it to me after my return. In toddler terms, this is the equivalent of hardcore sleep training where you close the bedroom door at 7pm and don’t open it again til the morning, no matter what noises emerge from the room (said with literally no judgement about anyone’s child-related sleep choices - we’re all doing what we have to do to stay sane).
Whatever it is you decide to do, the key thing is to tell people that you’re doing it. To simply delete all messages from my inbox across a six month period and not tell the people that’s what’s happening is clearly irresponsible. If you decide you’re not going to answer messages on a Friday, then let your team know and set an out of office so no one is expecting you to reply. And I think we should also make use of that retro tool, the telephone. If I’m off email for a period of time - a holiday or a training course for example - I make it clear that I won’t be checking messages, but people are entirely free to call me if something urgent comes up. I can count on one hand the number of occasions that I’ve needed to pick up the phone during these periods of time - because, when it’s not as simple as tapping something out on a computer and hitting send, people tend to think a bit more carefully about whether they really need to bother you.
My partner’s right - I should chill out about the spam emails. They may be signed off from ‘Jenny’ or ‘Dave’ but they’re clearly written by an AI who has literally no feelings about whether I respond and in what timeframe. But I think it’s fine to take pride in being a leader who’s not too grand to respond to people - just as long as I’m not taking cover in an inbox instead of facing up to the difficult bits of my job.
Haaaaaa! Yes!!! I feel you. I had this same issue on the weekend when I had an email telling me my YouTube SEO was really poor. They added a one liner saying ‘we could help’, but didn’t think of elaborating….
So, I emailed back suggesting they flip the weight from 99% telling me I was rubbish and 1% telling me they could fix it to 99% what they could do for me and 1% my SEO was sub-par! I’m guessing they unsubscribed me….