“After careful consideration of your proposal, I will not be attending lunch with you last Friday.”
This is one of several reasons I eventually ditched Facebook… People would text me a bunch of bullshit drama on FB messenger while I was at work and couldn’t stop to look at it, then start sending me more messages asking why I wasn’t responding lol
I would hate to be a teenager in this day and age. The amount of drama that gets started over shit like you’re talking about is insane.
As shitty as Facebook is, Snapchat takes that and dials it up to an 11.
I have it on good info from my 16 year old that it is completely unacceptable to:
- Leave a snap (message) unopened for any major length of time. How long is highly subjective.
- Open a snap and not respond.
- Group chat.
- Send a normal message that doesn’t include a cringy photo of half your face.
Kids actually get upset over this stuff.
I’m just like, “I have a phone number. You can call or text it. If I feel like talking to you I’ll answer. If that’s a problem for you, too damn bad.”
Social media was a mistake and a phone camera is the worst invention of our lifetimes.
We destroyed society for absolute shit.
Phone cameras are actually pretty cool imo. Social media was def a mistake tho.
I disagree. Advertising with a tracking component was the worst invention of our lifetimes. Or, if you are really old, possibly advertising in general. It provides 90% of the incentive for companies to want all your information in the first place.
But for a time, a few shareholders got super rich! So totally great tradeoff, 100% worth it.
Almost nobody would undo the internet, but plenty of kids would undo social media (ONLY if it meant deleting it for all their peers, self removal doesn’t count).
Per Hard Fork podcast a couple months back
It was inevitable tho , and don’t get this twisted, I’m anti social media. The second internet became public and accessible to literally everyone social media was bound to happen. We are naturally social creatures and want to interact with others. The issue is people are farmed like fucking livestock now. Companies know what they are doing by fostering and facilitating this current form of behavior manipulation.
open a snap and not respond
THIS is the crazy one for me… I’m not a big user anymore but when I was, my friends and I used it for sending bullshit that didn’t require a response. Snapchat is awful for actual conversation
hi, teenager here, yeah it sucks ass and i lost a lot of friendships over simple petty shit that didn’t matter
they were sensitive and i guess i grew up a bit differently
Don’t worry. It’s just a normal part of life to grow, apart. I feel that in any time or era, if a friendship would crumble over petty BS, it wasn’t made of strong bonds. Still though, it can be saddening and disappointing. I’m sorry.
And it gets worse than that - my partner is an admin at a high school, and the cyber bullying, filming of fights, and the viral TikTok trends that make students just do overall dumb shit at school is insane. Not to mention the students who have IG pics posing with guns that have a vaguely threatening caption. The teachers and admins have to try and monitor all that, if they can. Luckily a lot of the students who see it first do notify someone. It’s just a whole new world. So glad I didn’t have to deal with that shit when I was in school.
That amazes me too. My original point wasn’t to shit on kids. A lot of them don’t know any better and their parents failed them by letting them go skipping into the digital crack houses that are smart phones. Myself included.
But I find it fascinating how much “social” media seems to have increased the level of… uh… Dumbass behavior and the need to record and share every damned thing you do. In fairness, it’s not just kids that do this.
Most of the time, when my kid is having a dumbass moment, her mom and I already have a pretty good idea that something is up. We are ALWAYS able to confirm it with pictures or videos because these kids seem incapable of doing stupid shit without recording it for posterity.
It always goes something like this:
Me: “Were you drinking at [random friends] house?”
Her: “No. I wouldn’t do that.”
Me: “Oh. Really?” Plays video of my child falling down drunk
Me: “That’s so weird. [Random friend] has another friend that looks exactly like you.”
Her: “Whoops.”
Me: “Yeah. Whoops.”
Don’t get me wrong. Teenager me made plenty of stupid decisions and the few camera phones floating around during my high school years weren’t good for much. But there was no way in hell I would have let someone take pictures of me doing something that I knew I would have gotten in trouble for. Because sure as shit that photographic evidence would somehow have made it’s way to my parents.
But I find it fascinating how much “social” media seems to have increased the level of… uh… Dumbass behavior and the need to record and share every damned thing you do.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that social media has increased the level of dumbass behavior (with the exception of being dumb enough to record it). Teenagers and adults alike had plenty of dumb behavior before social media and phone cameras too. Even the desperate need to impress others isn’t really new, people have poisoned (with drugs, makeup,…), mutilated (with plastic surgery) or bankrupted (with big houses, cars, boats,…) themselves since long before social media to impress others.
groupchat is unacceptable
So I’m in my really early 20s so i like to think i still able to relate to the youngings and hip youth but man thats just so odd to me
Tbf me and my friends have always been the weird kids so maybe its that but almost all my communication is either in a discord group chat with my irl buddies and some of their buddies, or a very small server that’s the same plus some of my online buddies.
On the note of being weird I never really got social media like instagram and stuff as I either wanna “follow” topics and following people I don’t know feels odd.
I do see the appeal tho as my sister is super into sports so following some of the big names that might move her forward makes sense to me
I had a point in here at one point but this just turned into a ramble
I either wanna “follow” topics and following people I don’t know feels odd.
Or at the very least just everything a particular person has to say about a particular topic, not about everything in their life (e.g. some author I like on the topic covered by their books, some programmer on their project,…).
Ah that makes sense
I’m a 28 years old asocial individual.
One girl (kinda same age) got highly irritated over me answering 20 minutes after seeing her message (wet hands, rain), and told not to text her again after me being reluctant to answer something romantic with sore throat, food poisoning and sleep deprivation at the same time.
(TBH, I do get a bit nervous when people don’t answer me in half an hour or so, but! I’m always conscious of this simply being my own anxiety, not something they are communicating.)
You, my friend, dodged a bullet with that one.
I don’t think she’s much weirder than myself ; but yes, there are things people have to understand for any relationship with them to be possible, and in this case my understanding was better.
Wow, that’s nuts. I’d be a terrible kid these days if that’s the case, because I’m lucky if I check my phone for messages more than twice/day. Usually I check around lunch time, and again when I’m putting off making dinner.
Sorry you posted this 13 minutes ago, and I just responded!
But, there was this person on the internet who was very wrong (not you), and they weren’t responding, and it was pissing me off, big time!!!
Sorry again.
Are y’all seeing the bullshit drama that’s starting on Lemmy?! There’s a post of a screenshot regarding email response times, and it somehow turned into a fight about Facebook. CRAZYYYY
What it feels like: https://youtu.be/JR8Q-afz170
One of the principal engineers I used to know had this as theirs:
“I don’t always respond to emails on time. If you need me to respond immediately, come to my desk Mon-Wed to say hello. If I’m not there, wait until Mon. If you’re in a different country, book a plane ticket the week prior and speak to me on Mon.”
The funny part is that they didn’t have a desk, and were almost always in a different office to where they were supposed to be.
I should do this. People always materialise at my shoulder the instant I get my headphones going again, and I can’t just blow them off because I have responsibilities.
Back when I worked in an office I had a coworker who would knock on the desk to get people’s attention… I didn’t love it
Creatives like artists and engineers really need Maker Time to operate. They got this far in life for a reason.
So basically a business week to respond to everything
edit: stop replying to this to tell me I’m a monster for expecting email to be a thing. I honestly don’t care, and all you’re doing is telling me you have a weird gen z hangup about email, and that you are a problem at your workplace and that you frustrate your coworkers.
Right!? What kind of email correspondence is this person engaged in that takes them 4 days to process and reply to?
I’d be interested to see their timeline for other forms of communication.
That’s what I am thinking. There are some things that make sense to take while but it seems weird to me to ask for a semi-blank check like this. I have coworkers that are awful at responding (weeks oftentimes) and it’s super frustrating.
If you need a fast response, don’t use email. In general, here’s my order of urgency and expected time to resolution:
- physically meet w/ them or phone call - <1 hr
- IM/SMS/etc - <1 day
- meeting invitation - by the meeting time
- physical mail/note on their desk - 1-2 weeks
- email - <1 month, but probably <1 week
- create a “ticket” - ??
I try to go as far down that list as possible, but no further.
If you’re getting frustrated, it means you’re probably going too far down that list.
This is wild to me, to be honest.
One of the great things about email, versus IMs and other more real-time forms of communication is that it gives the recipient the ability to address it in a more offline manner. In that way, I’ve always viewed it as more respective of people’s schedule and work habits, since it’s naturally asynchronous.
So I’m having trouble following the idea that people would view it as intrusive and obnoxious while also saying that the only way to get a reply from them the same week is to get in front of them with a real-time communication like a call or physical visit–way more disruptive to concentration.
The benefit of things like Slack is that you can ask a group instead of a specific individual, so I treat group chats like others treat email. You can do that with email, but there’s always the risk that someone will forget to reply all (so multiple people will try to do the same work), or the annoyance that someone replies to the group accidentally. With Slack, I can easily check if someone has responded at my regular check interval.
I very rarely directly message anyone on Slack, because that’s disruptive to their workflow. In the odd case where it needs to go to a single recipient and isn’t urgent, I’ll prefix the message with “not urgent” so they know they can safely ignore the message. The net result is that I can fit multiple use-cases into one system (broadcasts, less urgent one-on-one communication, urgent one-on-one communication), so I only need to check the one place.
At one company before we switched to Slack, I would have to check:
- email - beginning and end of day
- IM - only one-on-one, check 3-4x/day
- notes on my desk - whenever I returned to my desk
- in-person - people were bad at checking email, so I’d to physical followups periodically
Email was our primary communication method, and that had some issues:
- I’d spend way more time answering an email than I do w/ Slack because I want to anticipate as many questions as I can to keep the email conversation short
- we didn’t have groups properly set up, so inevitably we’d forget to add someone to the email chain, which means forwards and whatnot to keep everyone in the loop
- emails would frequently turn into in-person communication because something that seemed less urgent became more urgent
Slack fixed a number of these issues:
- time - whenever I get an urgent notification, I’ll go through and respond to a bunch of less urgent notifications while waiting for a response
- anyone can add anyone to a group, or you can add yourself if you browse groups
- it’s trivial to bump a notification in Slack by @ mentioning someone, either in a reply to a comment, or in a channel
I can usually hold 3-4 separate conversations at the same time in Slack, which I think has reduced our need for meetings. I can give short responses without having to anticipate other potential questions, because I know they’ll probably respond soon. So I end up engaging with Slack more often than email, but I spend less total time using it vs email because I don’t need to think through my responses nearly as carefully.
I check my email like I check my mail, once every couple of days - once a week. We have faster modes of communication and (especially in a work setting) if something is time sensitive you can give me a call or text/IM.
If checking my email somewhat regularly means people will call/IM me less, sign me up. I can’t get anything done with synchronous communication on the regular.
I mean, all of this is subjective and relative to context, but if someone can’t even respond to let you know they’re working on it in under a week, you probably have multiple other issues in your company beyond the individual.
And what does “fast” mean? I’m sending emails that are not urgent to respond to, but it feels like that lack of urgency is milked for all it is worth. I send them to people I know are in meetings all day. That way it’s harder for it to get lost. When 6 weeks go by and they’ve responded in no way, I don’t think the problem is that I sent it as an email. Even if it were only like 6 business days, that just feels like they’re either extremely disorganized or doing the job of three people (not the case with the biggest offenders at my company).
I honestly don’t check my work email at all unless I’m expecting something. Like 95% of the stuff there is crap from corporate (person X in dept. Y is retiring, make sure to fill out that survey, etc), and if it’s important, someone will mention it in our team meetings and I’ll search my email for it. All of our real work happens on Slack (so #2), so we pretty much never go beyond #3.
This certainly varies by company and role, but at least for mine, emails are where you send something if you want to say you sent it, but don’t actually want to follow up. So if we have a transient issue with one of our cloud services, I’ll email their support department and consider the matter resolved. Maybe they’ll fix it eventually, maybe they won’t, but it’s not worth my time to actually follow up. But if they do respond, that’s pretty cool!
That said, if your company culture is to respond to emails quickly, then that’s different. I’ve just never worked at a company or role like that, all of my actual work is over IM or meetings.
I mean, again, I wouldn’t classify my personal expectation of a week or two to be “quickly” by a long shot. The usual offender here would expect me to respond to any communication channel, about anything, within minutes or hours. The company culture doesn’t really set any explicit expectations about email other than it shouldn’t be a channel for super quick communication.
To me in most of the cases I deal with, it’s a common courtesy issue. Questions about a major product that millions of people use in production shouldn’t be ignored, but they often are. If I sent the emails as Slack instead, it has historically been even worse of a problem because they are usually in a meeting and forget to come back to it later.
emails are where you send something if you want to say you sent it, but don’t actually want to follow up
If that were remotely the case, I’d never even check my email. That’s an odd standard to have, imo.
Then that person is a hypocrite. If they’re expecting responses quickly, but using a medium that’s not designed for fast responses, that’s on them and you should tell them as much.
because they are usually in a meeting and forget to come back to it later
Then ping them again. If it truly is important enough to send an IM over, it’s important enough to follow up after a couple hours.
I’d never even check my email
And that’s why I and pretty much my whole team doesn’t check their email very often. Occasionally there’s something interesting or useful, but almost never. Email is there to broadcast messages to the group that don’t fit nicely into an IM, and they’re usually accompanied with an IM to the group to look for that email.
That’s how every company I’ve worked at has operated. I’m not in sales or customer support, so it’s really not part of my job expectations to deal with email. If something needs to go to another department, it’s probably above my pay grade anyway, so I’ll ask someone else to handle it. I manage a team with almost zero interaction with anyone outside our group, and whenever I need to do something over email, I get explicitly asked to do so (e.g. I had to submit some paperwork for one of my employee’s immigration work, which I did follow up on promptly over email).
We do family reunions every year as well, and those are organized on email, but my parents send a text whenever there’s something important there (e.g. voting on where to go, what to do, etc). I pay attention to the email for the next couple weeks until things get resolved, then I go back to largely ignoring it.
I’m trying to do better about it, but honestly, there’s almost zero repercussions for ignoring it. The things I’ve missed are miniscule to the amount of time I’ve saved by ignoring it.
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Who said it was a business email?
Yeah, it’s just being inconsiderate wrapped up in pseudo-philosophical bullshit. Read the email, gather your thoughts for a minute, type a five minute response. If you’re making email more complex than that without a really good reason, take some lessons or something. One of my most useful courses in college had a business email section.
It really depends on the type of email. Some questions can be answered quite quickly, others are just task assignments in disguise, often for tasks that are really the sending person’s responsibility to research on their own.
Then give a preliminary response, don’t leave them hanging around. Easy!
Thank you! God some of the people replying to me here need to listen to you. Yeah, email isn’t complicated! Like at all.
If you fire off a email and youre pissed that they’re not responding on YOUR time, thats a YOU problem.
It’s not about it being complicated. It’s about knowing boundaries.
I don’t care. You haven’t taken a moment to wonder what my actual expectations are. I’m tired of debating this shit with a bunch of teenagers.
Nah.
Do you drop everything to respond to everybody?
Seems miserable to be at everyone’s whim and you should reconsider.
Obviously no. I’ve been in an environment where I was expected to be breaking my concentration to check my email every 15 minutes and, yes, it was miserable. But that is not what this email signature is suggesting. Four days of silence is ridiculous.
I usually just scan through my email for anything important while switching tasks. If there’s something time sensitive or trivial, respond immediately. Otherwise, I put a response on my to do list and get back to them usually later that day. Gmail also has a feature to “snooze” an email to show up at a later time. And of course email filtering helps keep the clutter down.
What the hell is in those e-mails that requires 2 days of pondering?
Requests for available meeting times. I figure if I drag my feet on scheduling a meeting someone urgently wants to have they’ll eventually just email the fucking questions and save us both 90 minutes of pointless bullshit.
I actually made an online meeting request process with a minimum 2-week turnaround just to make scheduling meetings with my department annoying. I only have so much time, and if I honored all requests I’d be spending 60+ hours a week in meetings and none actually doing my job.
In a project manager. Meetings are my job. If I made my customers wait two weeks to schedule a meeting, I’d be fired. Two weeks to hold it? Maybe. Two weeks to schedule? No.
Could you perhaps cut down on the number of meetings you have? I’ve found that 99% of meetings I get invited to could usually have been an email or a slack message, but then people just want to waste time talking to make it look like they’re doing stuff instead of actually just doing stuff.
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“Would you please send me that report we talked about? And also let me know which time period you would travel back to if you had a time machine and could only use it once?”
I’d go back to 2019 and marry my wife again 🥰
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Me: “You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”
Also Me: “Ahhh! My foot!! Son of a… Ah ha ha!!! Oh God it hurts so bad!!”
And also let me know which time period you would travel back to if you had a time machine and could only use it once?”
I mean, is there any valid answer aside from the '90s? '80s were cool but still too backwards, plus you still got the cool stuff from then in the later decade, anything before is “I don’t want to die of a minor sickness” territory.
The 1920’s to the 1970’s are a no go just from the leaded gas use alone. Short BttF trip, sure, but I wouldn’t want to live through that shit. If we think micro plastics is bad now, we use to put fast food in styrofoam up to the 80’s.
Naw fuck it, when were tyrannosaurs around? I pick then
Yeah, seems like an exciting way to kill myself. Better than my current life plans so why not? No one said I had to survive in the past, just visit.
Oh I’d try my best to survive. I wonder how much shit I can cram in the time machine; I can probably rig a generator to run off a wood fire
The first diesel engine ran on coal dust. I’m sure you could modify a diesel generator to run on charcoal dust, which you could make with a wood fire.
Search “Wood Gasification Engine” online.
I had been thinking straight-up steam, hadn’t even considered charcoal/bio diesel.
Though I do like the wood gas idea; should be easy to retune a propane engine for it
I sense a fellow autistic individual
Eh, I need to find time to fit whatever request came in to my schedule.
I personally ignore emails with vague responses, especially if they treat email like a text message. Im not interested in instant communication via email.
For example:
“Can we meet?”
Should have answered the 5 Ws and name a time so the email is actionable. Otherwise I’ll boomerang it and reply in a few days.
Yeah but this person isn’t simply ignoring it, they eventually answer, allegedly after long consideration.
This seems really pompous and self important to me. Most people know to not expect an immediate response. I know it’s a joke but to say “it will take me 4 days to acknowledge you” is strange.
While I agree, I understand their sentiment.
Nobody deserves a response.
I tend to surround myself with people who are chill, and immediately drop off anyone who responds/reacts quickly.
I met a person at a meetup and connected. The next day, I had 3 text responses with small talk. Like “Hey what’s up?” “What’s your day like?” “How is work?” Fuck that, chill. they’re a perfect candidate for this.
I accidentally logged on Facebook to fix a permission and almost instantly, I get bombarded with messages that I log off. Apparently me avoiding a message was so hostile that one of them proceeded to call me asking why Im ignoring them. Like damn, chill. I’ll message you when I’m ready.
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Almost 2 decades ago I figured out that, from the very start in a new job, you have to train others to not expect constant availability and immediate response from you.
Things like “work phone and work e-mail are only for work hours” and only checking e-mails once in a while rather than being a slave-to-notifications interrupting anything I might be doing to check any e-mail coming in and replying to it (if you know the psychology of effective working, externally driven frequent interruptions is one of the most unproductive ways to work and is needlessly stressful).
It’s pretty hard getting away with changing this later after people have already baked in expectations about your “availability” (personally, I never succeeded in that), but it works if you’re doing this kind of “flow control” up front and reliably do eventually get around to look into and addressing whatever people sent you - in fact you’re likely more reliable than those providing “immediate availability” because it’s a lot easier to have things under control and naturally prioritise by importance, so important stuff won’t just “fall to the bottom of the pile” because a bunch of fresh requests came in distracting you away from the more important stuff and you forgot about it.
There are other, more indirect upsides, such as “shit they can solve themselves” from other people seldom getting to you because they know you won’t immediatelly drop everything to solve any problem of theirs, so won’t just mail you and sit on their arses waiting and instead have a go or two at it themselves and “self-solving problems” (the kind of stuff that turns out not to be a problem but instead a misinterpretation or are caused by temporary conditions elsewhere and out of your control) solving themselves before you get around to looking into them,
That said, I do have a hierarchy of access, with e-mails being treated as less urgent and phone calls as more urgent, though even in the latter I’ll consistently (consistency is important in managing other people’s expectations) push back - i.e. “send me an e-mail and I’ll look into it when I have availability” - if somebody calls me with stuff that’s not important and urgent enough to justify using that “channel”.
All this to say that for me what’s in this post just looks like a more advanced version of what I do for time management, productivity and stress control.
I learned this when I got into Tech Support and switched to an engineer.
TechSupport. I was on tickets all the time so if you ping me on teams I’d ping back immediately if I was free or within 2 min if I was on a call.
Engineer? Nope. Might get a ping back before lunch if you’re lucky. I prefer not to break my concentration scripting. It fucks upy flow.
Well, that’s the thing: in customer facing (even if it’s an internal “customer”) occupations there’s usually no other choice but be driven by external timings, but if you’re doing software development or any other kind of thinking/creation work, frequent interruptions just break your concentration, pull you out of Flow (the psychological state of maximum productivity), force you to mentally switch tracks (a form of overhead cost) and often make you lose track of what you’re doing, not to mention being a source of unecessary stress.
Unfortunatelly, whilst some are good, plenty of Engineering environments and managers are pretty bad when it comes to recognizing the costs of frequent interruptions and supporting a maximum productivity environment, from the systemic corporate-wide problem which is “open space” work areas to managers who themselves are overstressed firefighters with poor time, impulse and prioritization control, the kind of reactive unstructured behaviour that ends up disrupting everybody else’s work flow.
I have such passionate hate for open space work environments. Even the proported benefits are bullshit. It doesn’t improve communication, I still have to get up and talk to the person across from me. Between me being an engineer and needing to think when I’m at my desk to my coworker who has frequent phone calls to my coworker who likes to eat his pungent lunches at his desk (he routinely eats horseradish there and takes a different lunch time than I do), my desk can be rendered unusable for focused work on a regular basis. An office would just solve that issue and a cubicle would greatly improve it.
Also it’s awkward doing creative work out in the open. I prefer closed spaces for it
In my experience, it’s normal for people to just never respond to emails.
Yup. I’m trying to be better about it, but if you actually want me to respond, text or call me. At work, Slack me (only my boss and one coworker has my phone number).
It’s interesting to read the comments here. Without taking a stance, it looks like everyone has a different personal experience in terms of how fast their life circle expects them to respond digitally.
I see it as two types of people.
Managers expect quick responses. They jump into meetings. They ask for frequent status updates. They’re pissed when you ignore them for a day.
Makers need time to think and create. They code for hours of uninterrupted time. They’re generating art or fine tuning a song. Asking for a status update is an interruption, and every interruption isn’t a lost moment, but a severe disruption.
You’re seeing that in the comments. Some are makers. Some are managers. We both require different things.
You can read more about it here: Makers vs managers schedule
Maybe the answer is to have a proper inbox tray. The business doesn’t really understand that we (as in software developers) don’t even know that email exists. We’re not colour coding everything that comes in and cleaning them up when they’re processed, and we will not see your email amid all the auto-generated crap.
Must be a geologist.
I initially majored in Geology and I can certainly Identify with this sentiment.
Sediment was right there…
Yeah, well maybe that’s why I didn’t finish the degree.
Here’s the thing. If it’s from someone internal, we have instant messaging if say u want some kind of message instantly. If I get an email, I’m assuming I have time to action it. If I’m not busy, sure, I’ll action it right away, but if I am and I see an email come in from someone internal not marked high importance, there’s a good chance I’m not even reading it for like 2-3 hours maybe more. I absolutely hate when someone sends an email and a follow up like an hour later. If it’s urgent, u need to convey that in some way, shape, or form.
instant messaging
Yeah, screw that. If it’s urgent, call me or walk by my desk. I’ll read IMs when I get to them. Not breaking up my workflow for every little thing.
Eh I’m remote so going to people’s desk isn’t an option. IM is the closest thing I’ve got. Imo since Covid, calling someone without IMing 1st to ask if they’re free for a call isn’t really kosher at least in our office.
Sure, but don’t expect an instant answer to an IM.
Being able to prioritize what needs to be done now and what could take 4 days, and what can simply not be done is an art.
Both on the sender and de receiver.
I totally agree with the dude, but that sounds pretentious af
As any email address will eventually become unusable due to spam… An email is a very ineffective way to communicate. Eventually every address becomes abandoned
