“After careful consideration of your proposal, I will not be attending lunch with you last Friday.”
I totally agree with the dude, but that sounds pretentious af
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.
They gotta have time to watch that 12 hours of tiktok before the respond.
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.
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.
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
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.
Creatives like artists and engineers really need Maker Time to operate. They got this far in life for a reason.
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.
“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?”
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.
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.
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
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.”
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
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
