[throw10920]

Still a tragedy of the commons situation. Slack, text messages, and phone calls are more synchronous media that demand more attention from the recipient - attention which you usually have no right to ask for - and escalation of everyone using email to Slack/meeting invite/text/phone call is worse off for everyone.

[31835843]

Agreed. I wish I knew what the solution was. I used to be very anxious about following up on everything. But burn out has made me more resigned to the fact that it’s just impossible

[throw10920]

I haven't found a way of fixing this problem individually - I believe that the only solution is systemic/cultural, where the work culture has to change to one where initiators of communication are more restrained and receivers are more diligent about following up.

I believe that the fact that senders are trigger-happy and receivers aren't great at reading suggests that the root problem behind both symptoms is that both groups don't value the time of others very well, which would explain both sides of the problem - although I'm open to alternative explanations.

[sokoloff]

One issue is there’s no active signal of current load on your communications partner.

If I’m visibly on the phone or you get a busy signal, you know I’m tied up. If you fire off an email, you can’t know if yours is one of two or one of two-thousand emails I have to process.

If I’m overloaded, there are emails that I won’t get to, pretty nearly by the definition of overloaded. If I’m overloaded and you have no signal of that, it’s not likely to go well for our communications, but doesn’t (necessarily) mean that I devalue your time.

[bogeholm]

> One issue is there’s no active signal of current load on your communications partner.

How about something like this: for every 25 unread emails in the recipient’s inbox, the sender needs to hold down the ‘Send’ button for an additional second

[sokoloff]

To send me a gmail right now, you'd have to hold send for a little over 3 minutes. To send me a work email right now, you'd have to hold it for almost 20 minutes. Works for me! :)

(Of course, you can't know the actual destination mailbox [nor its contents] at the time of sending the email [forwarders, mailing lists, not wanting to leak information, etc]).

[bogeholm]

Well, sounds like a pretty effective back-off multiplier to me :) With recipient-configurable values of course.

Maybe the problem with email is that is it such an old installation, in lack of a better word. I feel like there’s a better - almost similar - format waiting right around the corner.

In particular, sending has to incur some sort of ‘cost’ in terms of time or effort. This [0] needs to be doubly conservative.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle