After leaving Lisbon, I pretty much stopped checking my work emails.
It’s hard to answer them when your (free, leaching) wifi signal is unstable and you’re not sure your signal will stay connected for 30 seconds or 30 minutes. Actually one could be sure: surfing relatively unimportant crap, the signal would last an eternity. Need information on getting around Paris or trying to answer an important email, the signal would quit after 30 seconds and start the two minute search (again) for the free signal.
On secure connections, the hassle just isn’t worth it.
This meant that when I got to the office this morning, I had a week’s worth of old email to answer, some urgent, some not—and often it’s hard to tell.
If you read email from oldest to newest, you end up responding to problems that 15 minutes later you realize were already resolved by somebody else and that your response will only make you look somewhat like an ass.
Or, if you start with the newest, like I did initially, you read some emails and wonder why you were included in the emails in the first place, only to dissect the sequence of replies below the newest message to discover that once upon a time, about a week ago, the topic was actually relevant to you, but email being the beast that it is, the subject drifted and nobody bothered to take your name off the list.
I didn’t make that much headway on my email because I got sidetracked into other problems and issues—but I answered the ones that I hope were most important and tomorrow morning I return to continue vanquishing the dragons that want to burn me.
Yeah, I am with you on the email front. I had that happen last week. Of course, I just hit “delete” for a lot of the emails. {SNORT}