Been away from work and inbox is loaded. Read oldest or newest first?

[gypsyman]

So you've been away from work for a few weeks and your inbox is loaded with say 500 emails or pick a number. Do you work from the oldest or the newest?

 

[highland145]

1st should have been..."I'm on fucking vacation." notification.

2nd....delete all of the above.

But YMMV. I work for an asshole (me) and can get away with such crap.

 

[smackababy]

Don't read any of them, delete all them, move on with your life. If it was something important, they wouldn't have emailed it when you're out of the office.

 

[renz20003]

How many are from papa johns and twitter?

 

[Ns1]

ctrl + a, delete. anybody who cares will email you again.


I shit you not, I learned that from a VP of a F500 company. That's what she did after maternity leave, and probably got 9 or so follow-up emails as a result.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Delete all the crap like general notifications and all the stuff that's really not relevant. We get planned power outage notifications for places we don't even have equipment in. I just select all of those (thankfully they have the same title) and delete. No shift delete, just delete. That way you won't second guess if you accidentally selected a legit email by accident. I rarely ever permanently delete. I empty the trash once in a while as required only. There are lot of other misc stuff like that that I go through. That will bring the inbox to under a thousand email then I can start to quickly look at the old ones while keeping note of more important ones to go back to later.

I have tons of filters and stuff too which help a lot. Used to get several thousand per day before lol. We try to get general info stuff to go to our shared mailbox though, but we still get a lot of stuff to our personal ones.

Since we work shifts we typically don't set an out of office notification, as that just gets annoying to anyone emailing the whole group, as there will ALWAYS be some of us that are "out of office".

 

[highland145]

Question for you IT guys. If I block someone's email on ATT, do they get a notification? And if not, how do I give them one?

TIA

 

[rh71]

Personally I go through quickly to see what's BS and just toss those. That alone will be a huge relief. Then I go newest to oldest because some would be a chain of emails you can simply read backwards saving a ton of time.

You're not expected to go through 500 emails in a single day.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Speaking of coming back from vacation and going through hundreds of emails, one of my coworkers accidentally dropped a whole town because there was an email saying to deploy a generator ASAP if that town has a power outage since there was a defective battery string that was disconnected. Bad luck and that town had a power outage and he had not gotten to that email yet. lol. Oops! It's fun trying to call the tech in the area when the phones are down. Like, all the phones.

 

[BurnItDwn]

500 emails? I'd read em all in like 30 minutes.

 

[Ruptga]

search inbox for "on fire", read those, and delete the rest.

 

[TwiceOver]

Conversation view saves a bunch of time for me. I can delete whole swaths of emails in one swell foop.

 

[imported_tajmahal]

Oldest first. hmmmmmm in the last 4 weeks i've had 6 e-mails

 

[smackababy]

Oldest first. hmmmmmm in the last 4 weeks i've had 6 e-mails

Must be nice. I get like 50 a day. But, it is mostly from JIRA and builds.

 

[zinfamous]

Delete them all. YOLO.

 

[zinfamous]

But YMMV. I work for an asshole (me) and can get away with such crap.

 

[sdifox]

Ignore them. If it is important the person would send another one or be standing at your desk.

 

[Kaido]

Oldest first
Conversation view
GTD methodology
Inbox zero daily by EOD

 

[jman19]

Shift + Del

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

First , smack yourself in the head for not setting up an automated reply telling everyone you're out of the office till such a date. Then, smack yourself with the other hand for not telling them who to contact while you're out in the same automated reply. Finally, read the 500 emails. It will take half an hour as has already been said. It's your job.

 

[jman19]

First , smack yourself in the head for not setting up an automated reply telling everyone you're out of the office till such a date. Then, smack yourself with the other hand for not telling them who to contact while you're out in the same automated reply. Finally, read the 500 emails. It will take half an hour as has already been said. It's your job.

Out of office messages never seem to stop the deluge...

 

[notposting]

Seems like the older email already got the "out of office" reply, and if urgent — well, that ship has already sailed.

On the other hand, anything fairly urgent that came in the last day out of office could still be replied to, the response informs the sender that you will be back (and presumably checking their email) — cull any junk out that got past filters, and then check for anything recent and important.