This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. There was a time when your inbox was filled with actual delights. When you would eagerly look forward to checking it, when the “You’ve Got Mail” sound wasn’t cliched and weird but triggered a Pavlovian response. When every thing you found there was from a friend, or a relative, or some rando you met while chatting in a
A few casual "what the fucks" surrounding work/personal email...
1) I (and a few others I have talked to about this) have this habit of leaving one or three or four actionable emails unread to keep them in the inbox until they become little anchors of shame and anxiety as the task dies on the vine (meaning that it was likely not very important to begin with).
2) I don't know when it became a normal thing to schedule emails to go out after work hours as a purely performative thing...but that is a real Rubicon to cross in terms of blowing up your personal boundaries.
3) Churn (and their kissing cousin "sprint") cultures can go rot in a ditch somewhere. It's the equivalent of strip-mining your employees.
4) I will never work for another organization that emails me on vacation. If you can't handle a scheduled absence of moderate length without disrespecting that humane boundary, you're a shitty company and you're either malicious or incompetent (or both).
The amount of email I received in my previous job gave me actual physical symptoms of anxiety. I would avoid checking it, then when I did my heart rate would increase and I’d get short of breath when I saw the number of emails that had accumulated within the past 4, 6, 8, 12 hours or whatever. I could NEVER go more than 24 hours without checking it partially because of my own addiction to managing my inbox I’d developed and partially because the people emailing me (colleagues and students) often expected immediate responses. My email became a location of demand, complaint, and problems I didn’t have the time or capacity to solve. It represented the most difficult and disked aspects of my job, all pushed into one unavoidable list that had to be confronted multiple times a day, even through there were many other in-person aspects of my position. As you stated, I never wanted to be the one holding up a process (though I often was because of my persistent inability to ever get “ahead” of the to-do list my email presented me with). I would say that the effect that amount of email had on my life was one of the biggest reasons I decided to leave my job. I was absolutely not expecting that when I took the position. So...I feel like this conversation is important, because if not for email my career path might look different! Now I have a few different jobs, none of which depend on email in the same way. My physical symptoms of anxiety around my inbox have disappeared. It’s such a relief.
I had to develop firm email boundaries a few years ago when I was promoted to manager and then burned out. Work email is on my phone, but there are no notifications or badges, so it's there if I’m travelling, but otherwise, it's not a factor outside of working hours.
I try to *only* respond to my emails 3 times a day, the start of the day, after lunch, and around 5pm. But my email definitely becomes my to-do list, even if I respond to it, if theres an attachment thats actionable for me, its unread until I complete the task. Every morning I dread what fresh hell of emails will be waiting me in the morning...
By contrast my husband works on a potato farm. He has no work email and there’s such a freedom to that kind of job. its hard, labour intensive work, but there’s no hidden work. He comes home and he’s done for the day.
As a grad student, I've been experiencing real, major, physical anxiety when opening my inbox. My comprehensive exams are coming up (next week, ahh!!) and every time I open it I'm scared my advisors will have sent me another round of major edits, or that I'll have a new assignment delegated to me, or that I'll have an angry reminder about an email I forgot to reply to because I get so many a day. I've done some camping trips recently, and every time I come back home I feel so refreshed but also experience such dread before opening my inbox; I feel anxious every time I open it but more so after experiencing days of blissful, email-free joy. I've started to delete the app from my phone on weekends, and only reply 9-5 M-F, but it still gives me such stress.
This really resonated with me: “It is now a means to demonstrate co-presence with colleagues and enhance the pace and immediacy of busy office schedules.”
I have a job where it 95% of the time DOES NOT MATTER AT ALL where I am or when I start work for the day. But that is not understood by many of my colleauges, who seem to think that if you're not emailing at 7:30 (a.m.) you're not doing your job. So I have taken to writing emails at night and scheduling them for delivery the next morning. It looks like I am a super busy morning bee! Even though I am super fucking not.
Started a new role as a support engineer, and on my day 3 on the job, I had 175 mails in my inbox. Over emailing is a thing. Great article. Forwarding to my friends will increase their inboxes. I'd rather discuss this article over lunch. 😃
One of the features that still freaks me out a little bit is Streak, the plugin people can add that tells them when a receipient has opened their email, how many times, and even where. I don’t know how prevalent it is outside of the writing world, but knowing it existed increased anxiety in my own writing life and then personal life. I can be really slow at responding to emails partly because I often need time to think or time to type a response, so knowing someone might be using Streak made me feel like my own process for responding to emails was straightjacketed, even as a freelancer or just a friend. I found out how to block it but often worry that someone’s invented a workaround for the block. I understand it has other useful features but why put that particular kind of pressure on people?
This series is really resonating with my work situation at a tiny (3 person PR agency). We "went virtual" in Oct 2018 so working from home was already normal for us when Covid hit, but now my boss's email addiction and inability to disconnect has only been magnified since March. He has always been a bit of a dingbat but is now worryingly vague and forgetful. I have suggested several times that he take a day off, but his only concept of a day off is to go somewhere and stay in a hotel and since that's hard to do now (his wife is a middle school teacher with limited mobility), he refuses to consider it. He can't conceive of just unplugging at home for a day, watching some movies, taking up painting, whatever. The other employee and I have been able to prevent any major slipups with clients so far, but I feel like it's only a matter of time before he either has some kind of breakdown or we lose a client or two.
This whole post gave me so much anxiety! About half way through, I literally popped over to email to clear a to-do task that I had been ignoring and putting off. Continued reading, then, popped over again to check through my email to make sure I hadn't missed some overdue response.
"Office workers have come to think of email as non-work, or partial-work, or at least work that shouldn’t necessarily be compensated, or performed during work hours. In her study of office workers, she hears a similar explanation over and over again for why employees spend their Sunday nights and weekday evenings attending to their inboxes: it would be wasteful to spend the workday emailing, and clearing an inbox ahead of time means the workday itself is less stressful."
Maybe I'm too thick in the head but my personal email is for personal time and my work emails are for when I'm at work and/or doing work. If my job as a proto-academic is to multitask and that means attending to the various spokes of my work wheel (as I like to think of it) as I go through my day then so be it. I told my students that I would answer emails this Saturday because they have an assignment due today and I have a 48 moratorium on emails before anything is due and it was honestly the worst experience! It's not when I'm supposed to be working! Why do people do this to themselves regularly? It genuinely does not make sense to me. I get that "because email can be sent at all times, it can be responded to at all times," but do we really need to be 'on' at all times, especially if we are not being compensated accordingly?
I know I've already bombarded you with my thoughts on email, but I really do think that we do not know how to have good boundaries between leisure and/or personal time and work and email is a great case study for that issue. Maybe I'm just a bit thick or too stubborn for the work's good, but I just think having in my email signature my email/work hours isn't a bad thing. If people can't clue into those boundaries then that's is their problem and not mine.
As a career I work as a management consultant focusing on coaching teams to adopt agile processes. Usually this is in IT organizations who build software, but increasingly it's across companies.
It's resonated with me because it addresses a lot of what is talked about here. It forces leaders to define the outcomes they want achieved, it empowers teams to develop and manage the processes to drive outcomes themselves, and it forces transparency from all sides.
That does sound like some unreal Eden, and there's hard work to get to that point. But the improvements I've seen in individuals work-life balance as a result of adopting these processes have been profound and for many people career-defining (you can actually take time to figure out what elements of work you like to do!)
All this to say there are managers and consultants who are human and are trying to build organizations that have these problems solved.
I've been trying to be much better about work/life boundaries after a long period of burning myself out pretty hard, and email/digital communications are the hardest for me to give up. I am super responsive to time sensitive emails, but anything that requires a longer response languishes in my inbox, sometimes forever. I think, to me, because I don't want my inbox to become my to do list, I try to cross off those to dos fast if I can which means being always on. I literally paused halfway through this piece to write an email because I just needed it off my to do list. My office has tried a "Silent Day" policy where one day a week you are supposed to refrain from any asynchronous communication and both Slack and email were considered asynchronous. It's been nice because people are pretty good about not scheduling meetings those days, but the idea was definitely met by some, "but of course we're not doing the email thing, right?"
A few casual "what the fucks" surrounding work/personal email...
1) I (and a few others I have talked to about this) have this habit of leaving one or three or four actionable emails unread to keep them in the inbox until they become little anchors of shame and anxiety as the task dies on the vine (meaning that it was likely not very important to begin with).
2) I don't know when it became a normal thing to schedule emails to go out after work hours as a purely performative thing...but that is a real Rubicon to cross in terms of blowing up your personal boundaries.
3) Churn (and their kissing cousin "sprint") cultures can go rot in a ditch somewhere. It's the equivalent of strip-mining your employees.
4) I will never work for another organization that emails me on vacation. If you can't handle a scheduled absence of moderate length without disrespecting that humane boundary, you're a shitty company and you're either malicious or incompetent (or both).
The amount of email I received in my previous job gave me actual physical symptoms of anxiety. I would avoid checking it, then when I did my heart rate would increase and I’d get short of breath when I saw the number of emails that had accumulated within the past 4, 6, 8, 12 hours or whatever. I could NEVER go more than 24 hours without checking it partially because of my own addiction to managing my inbox I’d developed and partially because the people emailing me (colleagues and students) often expected immediate responses. My email became a location of demand, complaint, and problems I didn’t have the time or capacity to solve. It represented the most difficult and disked aspects of my job, all pushed into one unavoidable list that had to be confronted multiple times a day, even through there were many other in-person aspects of my position. As you stated, I never wanted to be the one holding up a process (though I often was because of my persistent inability to ever get “ahead” of the to-do list my email presented me with). I would say that the effect that amount of email had on my life was one of the biggest reasons I decided to leave my job. I was absolutely not expecting that when I took the position. So...I feel like this conversation is important, because if not for email my career path might look different! Now I have a few different jobs, none of which depend on email in the same way. My physical symptoms of anxiety around my inbox have disappeared. It’s such a relief.
I had to develop firm email boundaries a few years ago when I was promoted to manager and then burned out. Work email is on my phone, but there are no notifications or badges, so it's there if I’m travelling, but otherwise, it's not a factor outside of working hours.
I try to *only* respond to my emails 3 times a day, the start of the day, after lunch, and around 5pm. But my email definitely becomes my to-do list, even if I respond to it, if theres an attachment thats actionable for me, its unread until I complete the task. Every morning I dread what fresh hell of emails will be waiting me in the morning...
By contrast my husband works on a potato farm. He has no work email and there’s such a freedom to that kind of job. its hard, labour intensive work, but there’s no hidden work. He comes home and he’s done for the day.
As a grad student, I've been experiencing real, major, physical anxiety when opening my inbox. My comprehensive exams are coming up (next week, ahh!!) and every time I open it I'm scared my advisors will have sent me another round of major edits, or that I'll have a new assignment delegated to me, or that I'll have an angry reminder about an email I forgot to reply to because I get so many a day. I've done some camping trips recently, and every time I come back home I feel so refreshed but also experience such dread before opening my inbox; I feel anxious every time I open it but more so after experiencing days of blissful, email-free joy. I've started to delete the app from my phone on weekends, and only reply 9-5 M-F, but it still gives me such stress.
This really resonated with me: “It is now a means to demonstrate co-presence with colleagues and enhance the pace and immediacy of busy office schedules.”
I have a job where it 95% of the time DOES NOT MATTER AT ALL where I am or when I start work for the day. But that is not understood by many of my colleauges, who seem to think that if you're not emailing at 7:30 (a.m.) you're not doing your job. So I have taken to writing emails at night and scheduling them for delivery the next morning. It looks like I am a super busy morning bee! Even though I am super fucking not.
Started a new role as a support engineer, and on my day 3 on the job, I had 175 mails in my inbox. Over emailing is a thing. Great article. Forwarding to my friends will increase their inboxes. I'd rather discuss this article over lunch. 😃
I just need to say that that is the prettiest photo I have ever seen.
One of the features that still freaks me out a little bit is Streak, the plugin people can add that tells them when a receipient has opened their email, how many times, and even where. I don’t know how prevalent it is outside of the writing world, but knowing it existed increased anxiety in my own writing life and then personal life. I can be really slow at responding to emails partly because I often need time to think or time to type a response, so knowing someone might be using Streak made me feel like my own process for responding to emails was straightjacketed, even as a freelancer or just a friend. I found out how to block it but often worry that someone’s invented a workaround for the block. I understand it has other useful features but why put that particular kind of pressure on people?
This series is really resonating with my work situation at a tiny (3 person PR agency). We "went virtual" in Oct 2018 so working from home was already normal for us when Covid hit, but now my boss's email addiction and inability to disconnect has only been magnified since March. He has always been a bit of a dingbat but is now worryingly vague and forgetful. I have suggested several times that he take a day off, but his only concept of a day off is to go somewhere and stay in a hotel and since that's hard to do now (his wife is a middle school teacher with limited mobility), he refuses to consider it. He can't conceive of just unplugging at home for a day, watching some movies, taking up painting, whatever. The other employee and I have been able to prevent any major slipups with clients so far, but I feel like it's only a matter of time before he either has some kind of breakdown or we lose a client or two.
This whole post gave me so much anxiety! About half way through, I literally popped over to email to clear a to-do task that I had been ignoring and putting off. Continued reading, then, popped over again to check through my email to make sure I hadn't missed some overdue response.
"Office workers have come to think of email as non-work, or partial-work, or at least work that shouldn’t necessarily be compensated, or performed during work hours. In her study of office workers, she hears a similar explanation over and over again for why employees spend their Sunday nights and weekday evenings attending to their inboxes: it would be wasteful to spend the workday emailing, and clearing an inbox ahead of time means the workday itself is less stressful."
Maybe I'm too thick in the head but my personal email is for personal time and my work emails are for when I'm at work and/or doing work. If my job as a proto-academic is to multitask and that means attending to the various spokes of my work wheel (as I like to think of it) as I go through my day then so be it. I told my students that I would answer emails this Saturday because they have an assignment due today and I have a 48 moratorium on emails before anything is due and it was honestly the worst experience! It's not when I'm supposed to be working! Why do people do this to themselves regularly? It genuinely does not make sense to me. I get that "because email can be sent at all times, it can be responded to at all times," but do we really need to be 'on' at all times, especially if we are not being compensated accordingly?
I know I've already bombarded you with my thoughts on email, but I really do think that we do not know how to have good boundaries between leisure and/or personal time and work and email is a great case study for that issue. Maybe I'm just a bit thick or too stubborn for the work's good, but I just think having in my email signature my email/work hours isn't a bad thing. If people can't clue into those boundaries then that's is their problem and not mine.
As a career I work as a management consultant focusing on coaching teams to adopt agile processes. Usually this is in IT organizations who build software, but increasingly it's across companies.
It's resonated with me because it addresses a lot of what is talked about here. It forces leaders to define the outcomes they want achieved, it empowers teams to develop and manage the processes to drive outcomes themselves, and it forces transparency from all sides.
That does sound like some unreal Eden, and there's hard work to get to that point. But the improvements I've seen in individuals work-life balance as a result of adopting these processes have been profound and for many people career-defining (you can actually take time to figure out what elements of work you like to do!)
All this to say there are managers and consultants who are human and are trying to build organizations that have these problems solved.
I've been trying to be much better about work/life boundaries after a long period of burning myself out pretty hard, and email/digital communications are the hardest for me to give up. I am super responsive to time sensitive emails, but anything that requires a longer response languishes in my inbox, sometimes forever. I think, to me, because I don't want my inbox to become my to do list, I try to cross off those to dos fast if I can which means being always on. I literally paused halfway through this piece to write an email because I just needed it off my to do list. My office has tried a "Silent Day" policy where one day a week you are supposed to refrain from any asynchronous communication and both Slack and email were considered asynchronous. It's been nice because people are pretty good about not scheduling meetings those days, but the idea was definitely met by some, "but of course we're not doing the email thing, right?"