Day 375: Answering Every Email

Last year, I wasn’t great at staying on top of email, and there were many messages that went unanswered. I finally worked through all of them yesterday, and now I have no unanswered emails! (If you sent me an email last year and it went unanswered, I clearly missed you so please send it again.)

How do I avoid getting into the same situation? Some heuristics like “if you can reply within 3 minutes, do it right now” help, but there are some larger problems at play here.

One issue is that my inbox gets cluttered with messages that belong elsewhere. For example, instead of using the feedback / bug report forms for my products, some people email my personal email asking about Intention or some other product I’ve built. This makes it difficult for me to categorize and triage feedback, so I think I’m going to put a warning next to where my email is listed on my About page telling people that if the message is about one of my products, use the product feedback form or else it will go unanswered. (I still need to revamp my system for collecting product feedback because using Google Forms + Google Sheets is not good enough to deal with the amount of volume I get.)

The big question for me about email: Should I try to answer every email I receive?

Not answering an email feels like I’m ignoring people, but I think this can be mitigated by setting expectations on my about page where my email is listed. I’m not sure whether it actually makes sense to try to answer everyone who messages me.

I remember I tried to answer everyone who messaged my Facebook page back when I was making videos, and I quickly burned out because I was spending hours every day just responding to people. Basically, once you reach a certain level of visibility, it becomes impossible to keep up with incoming messages. As a result, I stopped checking that inbox entirely and have hundreds of messages that have piled up over the last several years. I checked it once a while back, and it was disappointing but not surprising that some people took my lack of response personally and sent angry messages.

I guess the reason why I feel the pull towards answering everyone who writes me is because I don’t want them to feel ignored. Because there’s no insight into why someone hasn’t responded, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that they simply don’t care when in fact they might have not seen your email, is feeling overwhelmed by emails, is dealing with a personal emergency, etc.

I like Patrick McKenzie’s tips for emailing busy people where he explains how he manages email and provides tips for writing him in a way that will lead to a response.

I think trying to answer every email in a timely manner is an unreasonable expectation to place on myself, especially because it’s mostly out of my control. When something that I build or write is seen by a lot of people and I end up getting a ton of messages, I shouldn’t feel beholden to answering everyone before being able to do other things with my life. If I keep those unanswered messages in my inbox, I’ll develop an unpleasant association with email and avoid checking it because it will always be a bottomless TODO list. (Source: this past year)

Okay, I’d like to try setting some lifestyle guidelines around email like I’ve done with meeting people via video chat and how I use my phone. I’m not sure what that will be just yet, but it will likely involve me acknowledging that while I will read all emails, I won’t be able to respond to each one.

At some point, I should compile all of my lifestyle guidelines into a “user guide” of sorts for interacting with me so that I can avoid misunderstandings when people run into the uncommon ways I live my life as it pertains to technology and real-time communication.

How do other people deal with these problems?