There was a period, not so far back, where relaying information was much more difficult than it is today. You would draft a letter, get an envelope, place a stamp, and physically make the effort to post the letter. The effort itself guaranteed that you would not squander your precious words on nonsense statements.
“Just alerting you that I have noticed your letter,” would have never justified itself as a statement on its own. Now? We exist in the age of never-ending email chains – a digital monster that vomits out of control for every single message sent, replacing high value responses with gratuitous “thanks,” or, “got it,” something completely unheard of 15 years ago.
My own personal fall into the madness of emails began on a Tuesday. On a Tuesday to be exact, one that seemed completely mundane and straight forward. Giving no indication of transforming into an ordeal with a whopping 73 message exchange that would expand over the course of 4 days while putting my already frail belief in human intelligence to the test.
It started off quite normally. Barbara, our office’s manager, sent an email to the entire company about the holiday party. Straightforward and simple: The party is on December 15, at 7 PM.
Dress Code is Business Casual, and feel free to bring a guest. A Simple 22-word statement that, at most, would require a calendar alert and some mental note. The subsequent turn of events cannot be addressed without use of the phrase ‘digital hysteria.’
Before long, my inbox was full to bursting with messages from all the employees.
First, I got Martin from Accounting: “Will there be vegetarian options?” It’s a smart question to ask, but could have been directed at only Barbara. From there, Martin’s question turned into a free-for-all. Sarah from Marketing replied to all saying that she was, “So excited!” which is so annoying.
She added at least four exclamation marks. Not to be outdone, Tom from IT sent a thumbs up to all. Because that certainly added value to an already busy sixty-three workdays.
Jessica wanted to know if the plus one applies to her dog. That is an interesting question, but definitely did not need to be asked in the middle of all of my client communications, and the quarterlies I was already dreading. By 10:30 I had deleted a company-wide notification from Derek asking if anyone knew if there was parking.
That was the least of my issues. To my surprise, all of my new emails were from Barbara’s original message. Not a single one was beneficial to my existence.
So there goes the last notification. That is when the actual disaster started. Robert from sales, surprised us all and put all his colleagues in the thread: “Kindly take me off this thread.” That was the worst thing he could say.
It was as bad as someone trying to put out a fire by pouring fuel over it. Almost immediately, three other users pressed “Reply All” on the email with the same intent. Then came the saviors: “Guys, stop using Reply All if you want to be removed from the thread!!,” they proclaimed, in yet another contrived ‘reply all’ message.
This type of dissonance was astonishing to say the least. By lunchtime, the thread had changed completely. What started out as a simple announcement for a holiday party turned into this:
A vote on whether or not we should offer remote work in the new year.
PeopleInsider: An outing to swap recipes was initiated when it was suggested that cookies be provided. An exchange regarding a different project deadline altogether. One person’s vacation photos, which were attached with every email sent on that thread, became a new topic altogether, and the email eventually grew bigger than the servers capacity.
To make matters worse, I decided to take a break for around two hours for a client meeting. Yes… when I returned that meeting, thirty-seven messages had piled up in the thread. One of the messages was highly amusing to read; it was from one of my co-workers who had mistakenly tried to forward the chaotic email to another colleague while trying to ask, “What exactly is going on?” But in reality, ended up hitting “Reply All.”
What amazed me was how the participants appeared to live in parallel universes.
They were not responding to each other and were talking at once. It did not feel like a conversation at all. The only thing they seemed to have in common was the subject line: ‘Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Holiday Party Announcement (PLEASE STOP REPLYING ALL),’ which became more and more alarming.
On Wednesday morning, a new subspecies of emails appeared: the righteous crusader. These mass emails contained phrases like ‘Please stop using Reply All’ and ‘This is getting ridiculous,’ as well as my favorite. The best email came from Legal where someone poured five paragraphs of unhindered self-awareness about correct email protocol for the entire company to see.
On Friday afternoon, the argument ended, not from anyone realizing how ridiculous it had become, but because our IT department enacted emergency measures where replies were blocked. This sent out a company email explaining the issue which in turn created a new thread. Although intense, this example is not one of a kind.
The “Reply All” button serves as evidence to the misplaced faith that people have that their ideas and thoughts are worthy enough to be presented in front of busy individuals. Blind optimism, if you will. This is nothing more than an attempt to stand on a chair in a cinema packed with people and pronounce that you are heading to the toilet.
However, there is more to the horror of the “Reply All” function than just sheer irritation. Instead of losing their ability to holding a coherent conversation, it feels like watching grown adults behave like over-excited children who have just received a megaphone. We leave realizing that the same people who handle heavy machinery and high-level accounts do not know how to address an email.
Thus begins the agony of losing hope forever. Yet again, the email thread for work addresses the issue of the variety of personality we identify as:
There’s The Ghost—an employee that never chooses to respond to a single email and is someone whose habits are idolized for never being achievable. The Historian sole purpose of addition on the thread is to remind you that the issue has already been handled three years ago and abruptly garnishes the conversation with an email claiming to be sent within the year of 2019.
The Comedian, who made use of obsolete memes thinks that a thread that has 64 emails about printer toner is an ideal space for inappropriate office jokes adding that memes dial up infomartion. The Tangent Starter, that changes the simple talk of when to hold meetings and replies with “This Gresminds me of…” only to continue with an unrelated story that magically garners almost 15 irrelevant replies. And last but not the least don’t forget To The Email Archalogist who replies to old threads that haven’t been active for weeks by answering the very first message, looking like they have come back from a deep sea holiday without internet, and pulling a trigger to calm down a thread that no one wanted to talk about.
To aid myself, I have implemented stress coping strategies over the last few yoars, to put my head down including, A set of email filters. And the so called ‘mute conversation’ function. Or something I have coined strategic ignorance where I just choose to ignore certain threads.
But still cover my head with a bandage, making me realize that it can not be a long term solution devoid a problem that seems charmed in the world of contemporary office today, A Kane Agun. I saw maybe the worst email disaster of my career. An employee forwarded an email gossiping about their boss to the Organization.
This followed by replying to the email where he gossiped about the boss blaming upper management. It snowballed into a digital mess. All employees were responding to email adding to the chaos.
One IT reply all email claimed that it was a reminder and everyone had access to company emails. At the end, the entire point was missed and everyone was focusing on the reply actions rather than the original email. What is extraordinary about Reply All culture is the mix of all the demographic groups.
It does not matter whether the colleague is younger and very much into technology or older and still prefers printing emails. Everyone understands this concept of productivity doom and makes use of it having no concern for whose silence goes disturbed. I find myself pondering whether there is a psychologic root to the Reply All issue.
Perhaps it relates to ‘fear of becoming irrelevant’ and is just a means of saying “I exist!” in the corporate world. It might also be the case of pure carelessness, concern for the impact of each mouse click too overwhelming for an already overloaded mind. Or maybe, it is a less common but a subtle workplace sabotage, a way to show some form of passive aggression to the so-called wrong-doers co-workers in the workplace.
But it does not matter, the expense is tremendous. A study that I made up but it seems to be entirely plausible claims that the average office employee wastes almost 7 years of their working life trying to coordinate pointless email threads. That is time that could have been used honing one’s craft, building relationships with people, or just staring into space and day dreaming, which in fact, is the best way to use it.
Diverse attempts have been made at achieving solutions. Some try to enforce technical guardrails, such as warnings when one tries to Reply All to more than 20 recipients. Houseplants are more likely to succeed in their attempts than these training programs.
Some brave companies have completely gotten rid of the Reply All feature, which makes employees manually fiddle with the email addresses in the “To:” section. If there is one thing humans excel at, it is ruthlessly unfathomable ways of complete lack of courtesy. As always, what is more exasperating is me dragging my head into the mess.
Even with all my rage and spite, I have been sucked into the black hole of Reply All. I often tend to justify my actions, for example I consider adding reporters to a group’s wide range of conversation that goes off topic as my contribution. However, there are days when I find myself most vulnerable and inaudibly add to the digital chit-chat that I so loath.
The worst part is, those memories are infectious. Threads reveal an unsettling reality about me: the call is coming from within the house. At various junctures, every one of us has been a sufferer and a plague.
In assembling the scattered parts of communication to chase after a pointless aim, each one of us has made suffering the new social norm. So what can we do? Perhaps rather than trying to resolve the issue through policy changes, we try to shift our attention to respecting the limited resources we have, that is, human attention.
It should be understood that each email creates a distraction that impedes someone from focusing on something more beneficial. Or, there’s a different consideration that is equally valid—taking a more drastic approach and trying to resolve problems by eliminating email culture altogether. Essays should be replaced with handwritten letters, email with carrier pigeons, and zoom calls with meaningful looks between colleagues.
For now, I carry on with the disheartening task of removing completely trivial messages, complaining under my breath about the downfall of the world, and on occasion, abusing the ‘Reply All’ button while being part of a group I never wanted to be involved in. Simply put, once we partake in an email thread, we’ve condemned ourselves to participate in a cruel digital world where I have to deactivate my account simply due to overwhelming shame. That is the bane of an uncensored thread.
We know it exists but we feel like we have to torture ourselves with digital requests of people moving on from basic “Thank you” messages.
