Dear your-name-here (possibly with some typos, but you know it is for you),
I hope this finds you well. I know this comes amidst a hundred emails wishing you the same for the same, but this one is different; this one will teach you how to get rid of about ninety-five of those.
First thing first: Following this guide, you may lose some... wait, sorry, where are my manners? Good day, or good evening if you are a desperate case.
Now, last thing second: I will break away from the tradition of placing the disclaimer at the bottom of the page in small font and will lay it right here, in normal-size font. I would even put it in red colour, or bold, but it would not look great on the website. It is only fair to warn you that by following this guide you may lose some opportunities to make millions from princes in countries far away or bank investors in countries nearby, and you might miss some important meetings and social events. The upside is that you will miss some important meetings and social events.
Are you ready to continue? Good, let us move on.
Firstly (or thirdly, if you keep track across paragraphs), you cannot get rid of all email. Well, you could, but some of it is rather good. It is useful to know when your chocolate-caramel-fudge-candy-filled-jumbo-donuts are shipping and if your bidding for the slimming shakes was accepted on eBay. It would also save you from refreshing the page every fifteen minutes on that German website for check for new clips if you subscribed to their newsletter. This is a compilation of best practices and recommendations from CEO's, entrepreneurs, journalists, celebrities, rich people (or their wives/husbands) who receive tons of email and still manage to be successful. Based on personal experience but without being successful or rich, I am going to explain how most of them are wrong and how the ones that are not wrong can be improved. You will get the best stuff in a single place: here. No ads*, no paywall or pop-ups with requests for donations. I do like donations, they are my favorite source of income along with alms and inheritance. But I would not ask for them.
Without further ado, straight into the topic. I am not the kind to digress in lengthy introductions with pompous statements and embellishments. Or to add unnecessary suspense to keep readers stuck to the screen for... right, where was I? I'll start, in no particular order.
6. Wake up early to read email. I was surprised to find out people would wake up unnaturally early just to get a head-start on email. This is a disaster: you still read email, and you also ruin your sleep. You not only damage your eyes and the important bit that sits behind them, but sleep is important. And I doubt people who do this will catch up later during the day power-napping at their desk. Utterly inefficient.
11. Look for long, important emails that would take less time to discuss in real-life. This is a mixed one. Personally, I would delete them first and wait for a come-back to see if they are important indeed. It is surprising to see how many turned out not to be after only a couple of weeks. Patience is a virtue. I do not have it, but I have the next best thing: laziness. If it turns out the topic was important, it is better to discuss it face to face, for several reasons. No, human interaction is not one of them. But you do not need to type long emails. And if your ideas were wrong, you may pretend later that you inferred something different all along. Verba volant, scripta manent. Pretentiousness aside, people have misunderstood the real value of this saying. Also, make sure there are no witnesses. Or that they will not be able to testify. How? Sorry, this is not a guide about abuse and intimidation. But I shall make a note of this.
3. If you want to receive less email, send less email. This little gem comes from a CEO, but I still agree. I write close to no email. And when I do, they are very short. Usually it is 'Tl;dr' or 'Unsubscribe'. If you are a CEO, I would imagine 'You are fired' or 'Excellent, you should work on this; you have until tomorrow evening to showcase a working demo' work just as well. I imagine the opposite may also work: if you have the patience, reply with long tedious emails. If you do not feel inspired, just find a long psalm related to the subject of office supplies or sales and distribution and make sure you attach an 18 MB corrupted PDF and reference to it. Particularly useful if you know they'll read on a mobile device.
8. Get one or more assistants to handle your email. If I could afford that, I do not see how this can be a problem in the first place; I would simply make the problem disappear by telling the captain to sail the yacht in an area where I can pretend to have no signal on my Vertu.
2. Ask people to indicate until when they need a reply. The irony is that this suggestion comes from a woman. Call me a
misogynistic sow all you want, sisters, but women tend to be as bad at estimating
time as men are at estimating the length of personal items. That aside, any deadline is irrelevant as a matter of principle (unless pizza delivery is involved). Should you miss a mark, you can always blame on some problems with your email account. "Yes, boss, again. I see it was supposed to be done on Thursday, but I just saw this 2 minutes ago, that is why I called. I really do not understand what those guys in IT are doing, but it is dreadful. That migration to cloud email only made things worse. Remember it also happened a few weeks ago before that meeting with Logistics?" If you are the proactive type, set an out-of-office-auto-reply with a return date after the deadline.
4. Never begin an email with "I". Apparently, this teaches you how to think through an issue. Could be, I have no idea. I usually begin with "You" and end with a drastic verb. Sometimes, when I want to give it a personal touch, I replace "You" with "Your mother" or "Your foster child".
24. Handle priority emails now and the rest later, at a less busy time. It sounds reasonable, but it is like setting up a scheduled task to delete emails later instead of deleting them right now. I still prefer to check in which warehouse my parcel of biscuits is at the moment. And then delete everything else.
8b. Forward the email to an appropriate person in the company, adding a question mark. I think this makes you look like a bit of a dictator. My personal take on this is to simply forward it to a random person that has nothing to do with that topic, without adding anything. Mysterious is better than bossy prick.
10. No emails one hour before bedtime; no emails early in the morning; no emails while spending time with family. Not much to add here. Except for: to make this better, sleep more often and wake up late. Oh, and it does not matter whose family it is.
31. Whenever you add someone in your address book, make a note on what you discussed with that person during the meeting so that you can get straight to the point. It sounds practical, but when I am writing an email I know exactly what I want to ask for. Otherwise I wouldn't be writing an email. If they want something, they can write the email. And I can delete it.
7. Whenever you become overwhelmed, declare Inbox bankruptcy, and start fresh. You might be tempted to think this sounds interesting, but you will sound like a whining hipster if you say it out loud. But do not stop there, please do go through the entire list of simple things you are incompetent at. Why not start fresh every morning? Silently, with just a quick hiss or two. Like an armpit deodorant. Yeah! Two can play the game of spouting stupid things that sound interesting.
9. Answer quickly, straight away, to any email. Interesting, but it can get tiresome. Especially with order confirmations and newsletters from noreply@some.mail. If you are serious about being quick, use automatic replies.
22. Never reply when you are emotional. I am very emotional behind my cold-blooded appearance, this goes straight up my alley. When asked why the weekly report was late two months I remind people that I have felt very emotional this winter and I could not handle any email. Do not use this excuse in August. Adapt. The season needn't be set in stone.
19. Do not allow emails between employees. Before you pop the champagne, it continues with encouraging people to meet and (gasp!) talk to their colleagues. As I am sipping from the cup of flat disappointment, I am pondering if that CEO thought how many of their staff will start sending sensitive information and confidential attachments through Yahoo or Hotmail. The silver-line for me is that NSFW replies from those addresses can be attacked in a lawsuit as grounds for dismissal.
37. Block access to emails after working hours and during weekends. It makes people feel less stressed and more in control of their personal life. I found out recently this has been long implemented at my workplace, too, but I have no idea when. I only check my emails between 10:45 and 14:50 on Tuesday and Friday anyway.
108. Fake business-cards. I could not agree more with this one. Partly because this is my idea. An accidental typo when you order your business cards can reduce the amount of email by 41%.
109. Automatic replies and rules. If there is one thing to remember from this guide, is to configure the auto-reply and automatic rules. One is proactive, one is reactive. And both immensely practical. If you feel intimidated by how many options there are when configuring rules, focus on those for that say Mark as read and Delete. The other thing to remember is that donations are welcome (in case you forgot, which I bet you did).
Do you have some ideas of your own for handling email? Feel free to email them to me. They are in safe hands.
*Disclaimer: Please disregard this part if I decided to put ads in the website later. If I do, it is only to still have a disclaimer at the end, despite saying earlier that I would not. And nothing else. Oh, and money.
No pop-ups, though. People who do pop-ups should be subscribed to Deepak Robbins' hourly newsletter.
21 January, 2018
07 January, 2018
A useless guide to annoying ballerinas
I met Sylvia during a corporate event. Well, by corporate event I mean a
drinking event where almost all attendants were colleagues from the office. And
by Sylvia, I mean... well, privacy is important. That, and I think do not think
her identity would bring any value to anyone. Her real name is Silvia, but
nobody should make a connection now that I have changed it to something
more difficult to type (especially on a keyboard with German layout).
To further obfuscate her identity throughout the story, I will add subtle variations, depending on whether I
remember to. Also, if you see her name in other story somewhere else, it might
not be the same person; my attention to such details slightly hovers above zero
when it comes to names, being predominantly allocated to crucial aspects of
life, like being partial to clothes with pockets that have zippers or making
sure that I use the minimum number of dishes when I am cooking. So, if you read
about the active aggressive ogre Sylvia in my useless guide to the Lord of the Rings*,
it is not the same person. Well, it is, wrong example. But if you read about
the bitter larch called Sylvia in my useless guide to coniferous forests in the
polar areas of Vietnam... damn it! Look, usually it is not the same person, ok?
Svetlana was the kind of woman that men would notice quickly at such an event. Let me explain. It was a party of IT people. For people not familiar with the world of IT, at such parties the ratio of women to men (some may not be called men, but let's anyway, for the sake of brevity and superficiality) is significantly insignificant. Most often she is a waitress or an exceptionally rare happy accident. As I would find out later at that event, Stephanie turned out to be a bit of both. Happy, tough, she was not.
(Later at that event...)
As I was the other woman at that party besides Suzanne, I started talking to her to keep the other, um, attendees away; they seem to be attracted by women who drink by themselves as if they see them on a computer monitor. An expensive computer. With a big monitor. And fast internet. Synthia (I am running out of names, sorry) told me she was some sort of project manager, but the more details she provided suggested she was an assistant manager. More exactly, an assistant to a manager. It is common in the corporate world to use made-up titles to paint rosy colors on less appealing hierarchy levels and duties. Sue (whew) was a glorified secretary and I would imagine most time she would be invited in the boardroom because the very white collars feel their time is too precious to take notes themselves. And for coffee or pastries. On several occasions she shared details about some communication she was about to send to her colleagues, and it turned out to be mostly summaries of notes she'd taken from meetings and asking them to confirm what they had said. Being observant, I understood she was discreetly asking for feedback and I suggested her ideas were tedious and void of content, which made them great for corporate communication and encouraged her to send them. Overall, my impression was that Suzy did not feel appreciated because her colleagues did not take her seriously. She did not ask for any advice regarding the coffee and pastries, but I was keen to divert from PowerPoints and emails and frustration caused by the discriminating corporatist nomenclature; I tackled the topic anyway and suggested mini-kebabs, onion rings and unfiltered German beer as an exciting distraction from the monotony of croissants, Danishes and decaf. Thus, hoping to cover all the aspects and bring the conversation to an end.
Silly me...
For people like Sharon, talking turgidly about tepid topics such as what they think they do at work is important and she kept on and on and on and on and on (and on), but her monologue was gradually stalled to a standstill by men trying to chat us up encouraged by 1) my silence breaks and 2) their alcohol intake. This led Susie to tackle a more stirring topic: men being pigs. Not only in the office, but in general. I am confident this last detail was a reasonable link between the derailed wagons in her train of thought.
(Painfully soon at the same event)
Sara used the scant sample of slightly inebriated men she'd just met at the event as a relevant example for the entire herd of men that have plagued her entire life. If you are precious like a ballerina (this would be end-quote if I remembered to start one) and are smiling and friendly men interpret it as you are being easy and inviting to lewd behaviour. As an ugly woman, I can certainly debunk such myths. But Gertrude (I panicked, sorry) was unstoppable: because of absolutely every man in the history of men she cannot be herself, she cannot wear the clothes she feels like wearing and cannot be as friendly and happy as nature has blessed her to be. And she cannot be as gracious as she can be, she continued briefly after downing half a pint of Guinness. She continued about how men misunderstand her easy-going attitude and how they do not take her seriously and are only looking for frivolity. Normally, I would have been happy to keep on answering with silent nods given that S-meralda did not really need input or other people's opinions in her debate. Unintentionally ironically, she was getting quite loud about how she keeps a low profile because of that. People would start to notice. And the last thing I needed was protracting the discussion. At that moment I decided to intervene gently and calm her down before any escalation. I began by suggesting there were other options of being discreet than a layer of make-up thicker than some low reliefs (which at least have the ornaments on the outside) and glowing red lipstick with a black contour. And I did agree with wearing slacks so tight, mostly when that is possibly the largest size available. To put things to an end I mentioned that ballerinas wear tutus instead of slacks, but warned it would be difficult to find her size in white; tutus that big are only available in camouflage colors for the army or in pink and yellow for circus tents.
I don't know how effective my advice was eventually, but it was great short-term. She did not say another word while I finished my drink, paid, and went home to work my fingers at Patapon. I would say it was pretty good, overall.
If this narrative feels long to you, it means I conveyed it right. Although it was probably five to ten minutes, it is exactly how I felt it, too. It was a dear price for learning how to spot and handle a Sophia ballerina (subtle hat tip here to Francis M.P. Boyle) but there you have it, for free. You are welcome.
*Note: After giving it some thought, I guess it makes more sense to call it "Lords of the Ring". There was only one ring relevant to the story and it involved several lords, which means this handles the plurals correctly. The wrong thing is that there is no drug lord in the film, which would cause his loyal gang of baddies with big motorcycles and heavy weaponry to quickly shift the balance of power between the over-sized leathery eagles and the struggling Sir Ian McKellen in favor of the latter; it is a known fact that gringos can beat griffons any time of the day. Mainly because griffons are nocturnal predators. Of course, this would not work so well if the fight is taking place at dusk, because there is a two-to-three hours tie-break until it gets dark and then the griffons have the advantage of superior sight against sleeping enemies. Or at dawn, when the griffons have the edge due to the gringos being hungover. Without getting more granular about time slots and the location of the battle relative to Earth's movement schedule around the Sun during the battle, such an imbalance during daytime would have led to a shorter film and speedier happy-end. And the rare footage of a Mexican stand-off between a wizard, a motor-gang and the cyclopic Sauron.
I am afraid in this case Narcos would be deprived of some originality, but I am not 100% sure. I have not watched it yet, but I would like to think it has griffons in it. Griffons are famous for their ability to carry vast amounts of narcotics across short-to-medium distance without wasting between two to three seasons digging a tunnel under the southern US border. Griffons are also known to take a derisive stance when it comes to annoying ballerinas such as Sylvia -this is why the namesake ogre was spared her life in the film, on grounds of being entertaining. Which makes them relevant to this story.
On the other hand, Mexicans are partial to big asses.
Svetlana was the kind of woman that men would notice quickly at such an event. Let me explain. It was a party of IT people. For people not familiar with the world of IT, at such parties the ratio of women to men (some may not be called men, but let's anyway, for the sake of brevity and superficiality) is significantly insignificant. Most often she is a waitress or an exceptionally rare happy accident. As I would find out later at that event, Stephanie turned out to be a bit of both. Happy, tough, she was not.
(Later at that event...)
As I was the other woman at that party besides Suzanne, I started talking to her to keep the other, um, attendees away; they seem to be attracted by women who drink by themselves as if they see them on a computer monitor. An expensive computer. With a big monitor. And fast internet. Synthia (I am running out of names, sorry) told me she was some sort of project manager, but the more details she provided suggested she was an assistant manager. More exactly, an assistant to a manager. It is common in the corporate world to use made-up titles to paint rosy colors on less appealing hierarchy levels and duties. Sue (whew) was a glorified secretary and I would imagine most time she would be invited in the boardroom because the very white collars feel their time is too precious to take notes themselves. And for coffee or pastries. On several occasions she shared details about some communication she was about to send to her colleagues, and it turned out to be mostly summaries of notes she'd taken from meetings and asking them to confirm what they had said. Being observant, I understood she was discreetly asking for feedback and I suggested her ideas were tedious and void of content, which made them great for corporate communication and encouraged her to send them. Overall, my impression was that Suzy did not feel appreciated because her colleagues did not take her seriously. She did not ask for any advice regarding the coffee and pastries, but I was keen to divert from PowerPoints and emails and frustration caused by the discriminating corporatist nomenclature; I tackled the topic anyway and suggested mini-kebabs, onion rings and unfiltered German beer as an exciting distraction from the monotony of croissants, Danishes and decaf. Thus, hoping to cover all the aspects and bring the conversation to an end.
Silly me...
For people like Sharon, talking turgidly about tepid topics such as what they think they do at work is important and she kept on and on and on and on and on (and on), but her monologue was gradually stalled to a standstill by men trying to chat us up encouraged by 1) my silence breaks and 2) their alcohol intake. This led Susie to tackle a more stirring topic: men being pigs. Not only in the office, but in general. I am confident this last detail was a reasonable link between the derailed wagons in her train of thought.
(Painfully soon at the same event)
Sara used the scant sample of slightly inebriated men she'd just met at the event as a relevant example for the entire herd of men that have plagued her entire life. If you are precious like a ballerina (this would be end-quote if I remembered to start one) and are smiling and friendly men interpret it as you are being easy and inviting to lewd behaviour. As an ugly woman, I can certainly debunk such myths. But Gertrude (I panicked, sorry) was unstoppable: because of absolutely every man in the history of men she cannot be herself, she cannot wear the clothes she feels like wearing and cannot be as friendly and happy as nature has blessed her to be. And she cannot be as gracious as she can be, she continued briefly after downing half a pint of Guinness. She continued about how men misunderstand her easy-going attitude and how they do not take her seriously and are only looking for frivolity. Normally, I would have been happy to keep on answering with silent nods given that S-meralda did not really need input or other people's opinions in her debate. Unintentionally ironically, she was getting quite loud about how she keeps a low profile because of that. People would start to notice. And the last thing I needed was protracting the discussion. At that moment I decided to intervene gently and calm her down before any escalation. I began by suggesting there were other options of being discreet than a layer of make-up thicker than some low reliefs (which at least have the ornaments on the outside) and glowing red lipstick with a black contour. And I did agree with wearing slacks so tight, mostly when that is possibly the largest size available. To put things to an end I mentioned that ballerinas wear tutus instead of slacks, but warned it would be difficult to find her size in white; tutus that big are only available in camouflage colors for the army or in pink and yellow for circus tents.
I don't know how effective my advice was eventually, but it was great short-term. She did not say another word while I finished my drink, paid, and went home to work my fingers at Patapon. I would say it was pretty good, overall.
If this narrative feels long to you, it means I conveyed it right. Although it was probably five to ten minutes, it is exactly how I felt it, too. It was a dear price for learning how to spot and handle a Sophia ballerina (subtle hat tip here to Francis M.P. Boyle) but there you have it, for free. You are welcome.
*Note: After giving it some thought, I guess it makes more sense to call it "Lords of the Ring". There was only one ring relevant to the story and it involved several lords, which means this handles the plurals correctly. The wrong thing is that there is no drug lord in the film, which would cause his loyal gang of baddies with big motorcycles and heavy weaponry to quickly shift the balance of power between the over-sized leathery eagles and the struggling Sir Ian McKellen in favor of the latter; it is a known fact that gringos can beat griffons any time of the day. Mainly because griffons are nocturnal predators. Of course, this would not work so well if the fight is taking place at dusk, because there is a two-to-three hours tie-break until it gets dark and then the griffons have the advantage of superior sight against sleeping enemies. Or at dawn, when the griffons have the edge due to the gringos being hungover. Without getting more granular about time slots and the location of the battle relative to Earth's movement schedule around the Sun during the battle, such an imbalance during daytime would have led to a shorter film and speedier happy-end. And the rare footage of a Mexican stand-off between a wizard, a motor-gang and the cyclopic Sauron.
I am afraid in this case Narcos would be deprived of some originality, but I am not 100% sure. I have not watched it yet, but I would like to think it has griffons in it. Griffons are famous for their ability to carry vast amounts of narcotics across short-to-medium distance without wasting between two to three seasons digging a tunnel under the southern US border. Griffons are also known to take a derisive stance when it comes to annoying ballerinas such as Sylvia -this is why the namesake ogre was spared her life in the film, on grounds of being entertaining. Which makes them relevant to this story.
On the other hand, Mexicans are partial to big asses.
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