The situation: Your boss asks a co-worker on maternity leave to auto-forward her emails to you. That coworker has signed up for every newsletter they’ve ever come across. And now you wake up with 50+ unread emails on a daily basis.
The advice:
The situation: You are your own worst enemy and find yourself doing both, creating an elaborate but potentially effective system to check and respond to emails while also spending two hours writing and rewriting email responses. Your system doesn’t stand a chance.
The advice:
The situation: Your founder is well known for responding to emails immediately. The culture of the office has now been formed on this response time. It is your first trip home to see your family in two years, and you would like to mute notifications on your Gmail/Outlook app for the weekend.
The advice:
The situation: You’ve got a team member who has misspelled your name in every single email, for the better part of a year. She also marks all her emails as ‘URGENT’, and they rarely are. You have never met in person. This weekend is the organisation offsite. The two of you will be sharing a room.
The advice:
The situation: It’s 9:00 am, you sit down at your desk, and open up your email.
The advice:
The situation: You started the day by telling yourself you will bring your unread email count down to zero. It is now 8:00 pm and you are nowhere close to achieving it. You think pushing the goal to tomorrow is reflective of personal failure.
The advice:
The situation: Your co-worker is notorious for never responding to texts or emails. She is having a particularly busy week, and is setting up an out-of-office auto-response so that people know to expect a delay. In that response, she would like to direct people to your email, if they do not hear from her.
The advice:
