Flooded with emails

I am sure most of you will agree that working life nowadays evolve around answering e-mails. As I was clearing my inbox and answering some of the so called “urgent” e-mails, I wondered… how was working life like before the days of e-mails?

On any given day, there will be a few mails coming in at the same time inquiring about different situations which require my advice. And in a typical corporate scenario, these inquiries demand immediate reply. And it’s not any ordinary reply. It requires thinking and sometimes, some level of research.

How are these done before the time of e-mails? Through telephone? If it’s through phone, at least you will be engaged on one line if there are 2 inquiries coming in. But with e-mails, you can have up to 10 inquiries in an hour. And inquiries are the light stuff. It can be agreements, contracts or any form of documents being sent over which require my review and comments. And as usual, everything is urgent. If you take more than a week to reply, it means that you are slow.

Without a doubt, the existence of e-mails has accelerated the pace at which we work. We are now required to provide answers, provide comments, review documents and meet all other unreasonable demands at light speed. It’s really crazy.

And don't you just hate it when one sends out a mail to a whole list of people re something and then someone else replies copying the whole army of people just to say "thank you" or something that we really don't give a shit about?? makes you want to go over and smack some senses into their heads, no?

One can say that we have become more efficient. But I just think we have been made to work like robots.