Ask Aunt Dot: too much

From the mailbag at [email protected]

A READER WRITES:

Hi Dot,

so I have a colleague who sends me emails a LOT of them every day, and if I
dont reply they get... not ornery so much as give me the impression that
are hurt, but yesterday there were 46 of them, and they all have some level
of valuable content, but... 46... thats a LOT and it has a cost, my time
at work is supposed to be for work and even though those emails
almost always have something to do with work I just cant wrap my mind
around that kind of time investment in a single day

any suggestions on how to handle it?

--Inundated at work

AUNT DOT ANSWERS:

Well, Inundated, what you've got is a colleague who mistakes volume for value, and that is a confusion I have seen sink better ships than yours. Down at the co-op they call it bad business. On my porch I call it a damn fool habit that somebody taught them and nobody ever corrected.

Here is what you do. You send one polite, plain-spoken email. You tell them you appreciate the information but cannot keep pace with the current arrangement, and would they please consolidate into a single daily summary. Firm. Friendly. The way you tell someone their fruitcake is more marble than fruit. Mine has been making the rounds since 1954 and it still gets the message across.

If they keep it up anyway, you start treating the excess the way Harrow Corners treated Harold Fitch's memos back in fifty-eight: you let them pile up, you do not apologize for it, and eventually the person sending them notices the silence and adjusts. Harold figured it out by September. Some folks need the quiet to hear themselves.

What you are really dealing with is someone who has not been taught that your attention is a finite thing and not a public utility. That is a lesson you can only deliver once, clearly, and then you have to mean it. If you keep opening every message and responding to prove you are a good sport, you are training them the wrong direction, same as feeding a raccoon off the back step and then acting surprised when it moves in.

Your inbox is a tool. The moment you let it run the day instead of the other way around, you have handed the keys to someone who does not know where anything is parked.

Teach people what your time is worth, or they will spend it for you and never once say thank you.