
PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really - queensnake
http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2011/04/so-im-trying-an-email-experiment.html
======
Legion
Interesting idea, but I highly dislike it.

The entire point of email is that it is the "leave a message and I'll get back
to you" mode of communication for the Internet. It is not the "respond right
now" mode - that is what IM and chat rooms and other real-time communications
are.

I have things to do too, you know, and keeping track of someone else's
schedule in order to be able to send them an email isn't on the list. The
whole point of email is that I can send on my schedule, and you can read it on
yours. Now you're taking that away from me and forcing me onto your schedule.

All one needs to do is put a vacation autoresponder on their email account,
and then have the self-control to not read email while they're out.

~~~
csallen
_> The whole point of email is that I can send on my schedule, and you can
read it on yours._

A major cause of email overload is that senders don't respect the "you can
read it on yours" part of that statement. Instead, they send emails requesting
info that they need to act on within a specific window of time (usually hours
or days). This implicitly assigns recipients a time limit, because responding
too late would be considered rude. If you're receiving 500+ emails a day that
expect a prompt response, you don't stand a chance.

Communication works both ways. If you can't be bothered to take my schedule
into account, then don't contact me. Complaining about this is akin to
complaining about someone having a secretary.

~~~
jwallaceparker
>> This implicitly assigns recipients a time limit, because responding too
late would be considered rude. If you're receiving 500+ emails a day that
expect a prompt response, you don't stand a chance.

This issue is addressed with a standard "Out of Office" response.

The difference here is that Dave is making everyone who emailed him wait until
some future date to re-send any non-urgent message.

It significantly reduces the workload for Dave but increases the workload for
others.

I'd be curious to hear the reaction of people who emailed him and had to wait
to re-send their message.

~~~
csallen
_> > It significantly reduces the workload for Dave but increases the workload
for others._

Yes, but that's to be expected. If you're a very popular person, people should
have to compete for your time. That's marginally inconvenient for them, yes,
but it makes your life livable. It's like important CEOs having a secretary.

~~~
officemonkey
> It's like important CEOs having a secretary.

I've never understood why busy people don't use staff to "pre-clean" the
inbox. Especially if you get dozens of emails a day. After a vacation (heck,
every day), I spend a lot of time deleting spam, daily reports, and threads
I'm cc'd in (but get resolved by others).

~~~
sivers
I do that, and it's the greatest thing ever.

For 3 years now, I've had a full-time assistant who filters all my email,
handles the FAQs, and only leaves a few per-day for me - just the ones that
only I know the answer to.

Anyone interested in this, feel free to email me for details.

~~~
officemonkey
...and my assistant will get back to you. :-)

------
DanielBMarkham
In the late 1990s I worked for a large government agency as part of a job that
employed over 1200 contractors (Welcome to government work.) Each day I'd get
incredible amounts of email -- most of which was completely useless to me.

Before I left, I asked if I could form a small team and take part in a 2-3
month project. They had initially planned on a team of 20, but I felt that
small teams, left alone and working in small timeboxes, could perform just as
well.

Of course, we performed much better than the larger team, but the reason I
tell the story is this: for purposes of my own experiment, I stopped reading
emails.

The customer loved what we were doing, and expanded the project some. I think
it lasted 5 or 6 months total. During that entire time I never turned on my
email program.

I finally left the job. God knows how many thousands of emails built up in my
inbox. But it was never a problem.

It was also one of the nicer experiences I've had in technology. The team just
called each other or walked to each other's cube and chatted when we needed to
talk, and the day was nicely free of useless distractions.

Why? I think the problem with email (and IM and FB now) is that _everything
has the same interruption power_. The email from HR with the monthly
newsletter has the same ability to disrupt your day as the email from your
accountant telling you some terribly important financial news. All of it
involves you switching contexts, scanning the subject line, and then deciding
to deep-dive on the material or not. Hell, by the time you've switched
context, you might as well read the article: your concentration is shot. Ten
seconds of scanning an email header might take five or ten minutes to recover
from. It's not a good trade-off. Of course, there's also the fact that people
email/IM/FB others _simply because they can,_ whether they have anything of
import to say or not. You'd think twice if you had to walk over to somebody's
cube to show them a picture of a cat, but you wouldn't blink an eye to post an
article with the same content to 100 people on FB.

~~~
hollerith
>Hell, by the time you've switched context, you might as well read the
article: your concentration is shot. Ten seconds of scanning an email header
might take five or ten minutes to recover from.

I read email only once or twice a day and have turned off all email
notifications, which eliminates this objection to email.

Footnote: "turned off all email notifications": exception: I set procmail to
play some music whenever my machine gets an email from my girlfriend, but that
is a temporary measure designed to condition her and reward her (with prompt
responses) for emailing instead of calling.

~~~
xonev
Oh man - I'd love to see how she'd react to the knowledge that she is being
conditioned.

~~~
officemonkey
He's the one who is responding to her promptly. Methinks he's the one being
conditioned.

~~~
otoburb
No, he's already conditioned himself to answer certain "high-priority" emails
quickly while responding with high latency to voicemails.

His girlfriend who will be more likely to change her behaviour in response to
this exercise, rather than him (i.e. he's already conditioned himself).

------
csallen
For all the talk about email overload, I'm surprised more people don't do
stuff like this. It's simple and effective.

Instead, everyone wants an AI solution that automatically separates the
important from the fluff. I hate to be a pessimist, but I'm doubtful we'll
produce a notable success in this area any time soon, if ever. Priority Inbox
certainly isn't it. I spent so much time double-checking its often-wrong
results that it made more sense to just stop relying on it.

The unfortunate fact is that the concept of "importance" is vague at best. It
differs from person to person, email to email. In many cases, the data that
makes an email important can't be found in the inbox at all, and only exists
in the real world. If I just met some guy in the hall, and promised that I'd
respond to his next email, how will your program take that into account? What
about online bank statements, which I normally delete instantly, but which can
sometimes be helpful in reminding me to check my account? What about a
Facebook message from a girl I find cute vs all the other Facebook messages?

Even humans have a hard time determining the importance of other people's
email. Here's a fun experiment: Go through your last 100 emails and write done
which ones were important to you. Now have a friend go through the same emails
and try to predict which ones you thought were important. You may be surprised
at the difference.

~~~
Swizec
Priority inbox works wonderfully for me. I practically never check anything
other than priority inbox anymore.

The way it deals with your scenario of meeting somebody new and then getting
an email from them is that any email sent directly to you from a new person is
marked as important.

The way it deals with your second scenario is machine learning. Everyone's
priority inbox behaves differently depending on how you train it.

~~~
michaelfeathers
I only check my priority inbox now too, but I feel that I need a priority
inbox for it.

------
arctangent
My understanding is that this is fairly common amongst management in large
organisations. (This understanding is based on my personal experience, so it
may not be universal.)

I've spoken to several people who indicate their busyness by how many hundred
emails they have to wade through when they return from holiday, and even met
people who seem to accumulate this much email while actually doing their job.

Every so often these people will remark that they've deleted everything older
than a certain number of days, on the understanding that if it was something
really important then the person would get back to them again.

This is obviously very frustrating for the people sending the emails (and I'm
sure I've fallen victim more than once) but I do see the merit in this
approach: some people have so many demands made of them that a key part of
their job is saying "no" to a lot of requests, and deleting emails is one way
of doing that.

Deleting email is a very basic filter and it will generate a lot of false
positives. But if something is really important then the person who needs
something done will find another way to contact you, or they will contact
someone else who can get things moving. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, as
they say.

I don't think I'd even consider this approach with a personal email address
though, because usually that mail is more important to my life that things
sent to my work email address. (Restricting who knows your personal email
address is another type of filter, I suppose.)

------
paul
This is good. I've considered doing something like this and making it part of
a daily process -- at the end of every day, any email that I haven't dealt
with gets a NACK, and every day starts fresh.

Email is a disaster because it lacks flow control. In person, if too many
people try to talk to me at once, they will have to wait their turn, and some
will eventually give up or move a little faster when they see that others are
waiting. Email lacks this dynamic -- everyone gets to talk at once. Disaster.

~~~
zrgiu_
what are you talking about ? You read the emails whenever you want, and answer
to them whenever you want. Too many people trying to talk to you at once is
IM. Email is totally different.

If you want to compare it to something, compare it to regular (snail) mail.
It's exactly the same thing.

The solution Dave chose (deleting emails while on holiday) is bad because
messages get lost, and it's only caused by his lack of will to NOT check his
email every 5 minutes. It completely defeats the purpose of mail.

Imagine disabling your regular mailbox while you go on vacation. What good
would that do ?

~~~
unalone
> If you want to compare it to something, compare it to regular (snail) mail.
> It's exactly the same thing.

No it's not. Email occupies the space right in between IM and snail mail. It
is way more convenient for me to send email than it is for me to write a
letter, and that email sends more quickly. People email you for all sorts of
reasons they'd never write a letter. I get tech support requests for Tumblr
themes I designed three years ago, and people asking me questions about things
I've written, and friends asking me what's up, and lots and lots of email from
people at my work. Because the Internet lets me publish without going through
a journal or magazine, I receive all the comments that, if I were a
traditional columnist, would be going to my editor instead. I'm not receiving
as much email as I used to when I kept a regularly-frequented blog, but even
so it's weary how much communication I receive.

If I spend a weekend without checking my email, then my flow is disrupted. I
have too many messages to respond to them all properly. So I prioritize them
and answer many of them curtly or delete some without replying at all. Or, I
make an excuse to check my email over the weekend.

If I went on vacation, I'd be incredibly anxious about the upcoming email
deluge awaiting me on my return. The temptation to check my email and relieve
the burden would be immense. I can sympathize with wanting to disable my inbox
until my return.

(The other difference between email and snail mail is that with email you know
immediately that your message was not received. With snail mail you're waiting
at least two days. That's a frustrating wait. The convenience of email makes
it less bothersome when somebody inconveniences your attempt to reach them.)

------
MichaelApproved
Isn't the bigger problem that he gets about 5,000 emails in the first place?
Maybe he was exadurting but I'm sure he gets more than his fair share and
that's too much _while_ on vacation but I bet he gets too much email _while_
on the clock too.

I think he need an overall change in how many people email him and how he
handles email while not on vacation as well as vacation. Deleting emails seems
like a short term solution.

------
raganwald
The passive-agressive way to do this is to have an auto-response saying you
cannot read the email and giving options for resolving issues while you're
away. And when you get back, send everyone an email declaring inbox
bankruptcy.

People respond positively when they get an email saying "I returned from
paternity leave to 1,532 emails and I'm worroed I may miss something important
from you. If the matter you raised while I was away still needs attention,
please resend it to me now."

------
synnik
This has been tried before and discussed before.

The problem with it is that it sends a message that, "I am more important than
you, and nothing you say can possibly be important enough to be worth
keeping."

Now, maybe that is even true. But slapping people in the face with it isn't a
good habit.

~~~
damoncali
That depends on the wording. What if it said "I'm on vacation, and when I get
back, your email will be one of several hundred that have piled up (I get a
lot of email). If this is a really important message, please send it again to
me later, when I'm back at work. If you don't there is a good chance I won't
get to it for a long time."?

------
bradly
Dave just wrote a followup post that can be read here:
[http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2011/11/followup...](http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2011/11/followup-
on-the-email-experiment.html)

------
melvinram
You know there is going to be at least one person who will reply back with
"URGENT" even though it's something simple like where do I download that
ebook. Don't be that guy.

------
ot
This reminds me of "Email sabbatical":

<http://www.danah.org/EmailSabbatical.html>

 _At its most crass level, an email sabbatical is when you make all of your
email bounce. But you can't simply turn off your email without pissing off
countless people in your life. Thus, an email sabbatical is actually a series
of steps to let you step away from your inbox guilt-free and return to an
empty inbox upon your return._

------
huhtenberg
Posted on April 11th, 2011 and it also happens to be the last post in the
blog. Perhaps deleting all inbound emails is _that_ life altering :)

------
kcvv
Seeing that this experiment was run in April 2011, I sure would like to see a
follow up on how it turned out.

~~~
mkopinsky
I just sent him an email alerting him to this thread and asking for the
results. Let's see if he responds.

~~~
yskchu
He did, new blog post with results:
[http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2011/11/followup...](http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2011/11/followup-
on-the-email-experiment.html)

------
tripzilch
This was posted in April, anyone know if there's a follow-up?

I'm assuming it went just fine, but it'd be nice to read about. Especially how
many "urgent" emails he got regardless, and how urgent they _really_ were.

------
dredmorbius
This is similar to Linus Torvalds's (former?) practice of "dropping patches"
in response to overload.

It's actually not a bad queue management process overall. Local processor
offline / overloaded? Drop all but the very highest priority (for email:
immediate family, $BOSS) messages.

The late Joe Barr describes this obliquely in his discussion of the
development of BitKeeper (git's predecessor as the Linux kernel code
repository): <http://joebarr.sys-con.com/node/32618/mobile>

------
darklajid
Loved the idea _until_ that 'urgent' loophole.

I'd have gone the whole way here, there's no (real..) reason for 'urgent'
mails during vacation.

~~~
Joakal
I'd automatically blacklist them. I'm sure people who have no respect will not
send any good future emails.

------
antirez
This is not enough, if I would do that only on vacations my productivity would
be a small percentage of what it is currently, since email is too much work to
provide a decent reply most of the time.

There are many reasons why writing emails is easy but replying is hard. The
first is probably that an email that requires a short processing time from the
point of view of the reader (read, understand, and possibly reply) must be
written very well. Not everybody is good at it, but everybody will send you an
email for the most unimportant reason.

So in this moment my inbox contains 5700 unread emails. Not everything is a
message directly addressed to me, a few are related to mailing lists, a few
about notifications of different types. But there is definitely a percentage
of real emails that would require a reply in that list.

So how I deal with this? Using the most brutal of the systems, as brutal is
the email problem itself IMHO.

I consider my gmail account as a stream, like twitter. I use the gmail
priority inbox to do a first filtering, taking the same account without
priority inbox in the iPhone (so that when I read emails with the iPhone there
is some chance that I read messages from the 'unimportant' pool).

I also set gmail to show as much emails as possible in a single page. So this
is what happens: every email has a time to live this way, from the moment it
appears in my inbox, to the moment it shifts away because too many new
messages arrived in the meantime.

I reply to conversations in a most-urgent-processed-first fashion. All the
emails shifting before they get a chance to be processed are lost from my
point of view.

This allows me to set a max cap to the amount of work I've to do for emails.
This will make people not happy about you from time to time, but are you ready
to trade your work, what you think is important, just to reply to messages
that many times are not important enough to be sent in the first instance?

------
mhartl
I did something similar on a recent six-week international trip. I set up a
dedicated "urgent" account (urgent@mydomain.com) and put an autoresponder on
my primary account telling people I was out of the country, with instructions
to send their message to the urgent account if the message was indeed urgent.
I checked my primary account a couple of times during the six weeks, and
handled a couple of things that needed to be dealt with (e.g., the expiration
of the UPS box where all my mail was being forwarded), but otherwise I
restricted myself to the urgent account. When I got back, I went through my
main inbox, but it only took an hour or so and I wasn't overwhelmed by the
results.

------
steve8918
At one of the companies that I worked at, one of the high-level architects had
the same message. His message was simpler, it was something along the lines
of:

"I'm on vacation and will be deleting all my accumulated emails when I get
back. If it's something important, please resend me the email after <date-of-
return>."

Personally I think this is fair because if it's important, the onus should be
on the sender to make sure that the receiver reads it. Chances are 99% of his
emails were just cc'es anyway, but if it's something that really needs a
decision, then the sender should resend it.

------
mikeleeorg
I had attended a workshop on time management several years ago, and one of the
suggestions was to delete your entire inbox when you return from vacation. The
theory was that if something was truly urgent, that person would track you
down. If not, it may have already gotten resolved and there's no need to hear
about it - a quick status update from your team could be enough.

I've done this several times and it's always worked out well. It's funny how
issues that people think are urgent sometimes resolve themselves.

------
Create
Cory Doctorow also did this, and it worked fine from the other end. It was
"deleting" in GOOG newspeak, I suppose it just sits there until read.

There was a detailed, longish autoreply explaining many things, but the gist
of it was:

-8<\-------------------------

It would kind of spoil the break to come home from it with a mountain of email
to answer, so I'm not accepting any email while I'm away. If you need to reach
me, please re-send your message after the Nth.

If you need to speak to someone immediately, here are some handy contacts:

\----------------------------

------
dhotson
I did something similar to this. I recently got back from a 6 week holiday—and
I just marked all my emails as read. Easy!

------
wedesoft
My autoresponder just sends "I'll read your e-mail when I return". In general
when reading e-mails takes too much time, I just read and respond to the rest
on another day (except e-mails from friends). If you respond to your 200
e-mails immediately, you can be sure to have 100 follow-up e-mails the next
day.

------
jerrya
I would like to know what percentage of people that set up the standard
vacation message ("on vacation, getting back on this day, for emergency
contact Jane") DO delete messages they get on vacation, and what percentage
read them but perhaps when they get back from vacation.

~~~
tomjen3
What about those who just scan the email subject and only read those that
matter? Heck that is what I do even when I am not coming home from a holiday.

------
djloche
I think this only works if your livelihood is not dependent on outside
communication.

For everyone else, if you make enough $, hire a personal assistant / secretary
to stay on top of your email and schedule.

------
savoytruffle
He looks like he can get away with it.

------
kahawe
Well, if you are in a position where YOU can pick your clients and/or your
employer, this might sound like an interesting or at least unique idea... but
if you are just like the rest of us, you will probably have a hell of a lot
more vacation coming your way by the time you are back. Unpaid, that is.

