Tag: email

The foundation of shit

I’ve been a commissioning editor in Indian science, health, and environment journalism for a little under a decade. I’ve learnt many lessons in this time but one in particular still surprises me. Whenever I receive an email, I’m quick to at least shoot off a holding reply: “I’m caught up with other stuff today, I’ll get back to you on this <whenever>”. Having a horizon makes time management much easier. What surprises me is that many commissioning editors don’t do this. I’ve heard the same story from scores of freelancing writers and reporters: “I email them but they just don’t reply for a long time.” Newsrooms are short-staffed everywhere and I readily empathise with any editor who says there’s just no time or mental bandwidth. But that’s also why the holding email exists and can even be automated to ask the sender to wait for <insert number here> hours. A few people have even said they prefer working with me because, among other things, I’m prompt. This really isn’t a brag. It’s a fruit hanging so low it’s touching the ground. Sure, it’s nice to have an advantage just by being someone who replies to emails and sets expectations – but if you think about it, especially from a freelancer’s point of view, it has a foundation of shit. It shouldn’t exist.

There’s a problem on the other side of this coin here. I picked up the habit of the holding email when I was with The Wire (before The Wire Science) – a very useful piece of advice SV gave me. When I first started to deploy it, it worked wonders when engaging with reporters and writers. Because I wrote back, almost always within less than half a day of their emails, they submitted more of their work. Bear in mind at this point that freelancers are juggling payments for past work (from this or other publications), negotiations for payment for the current submission, and work on other stories in the pipeline. In the midst of all this – and I’m narrating second-hand experiences here – to have an editor come along who replies possibly seems very alluring. Perhaps it’s one less variable to solve for. I certainly wanted to take advantage of it. Over time, however, a problem arose. Being prompt with emails means checking the inbox every <insert number here> minutes. I quickly lost my mind over having to check for new emails as often as I could, but I kept at it because the payoff stayed high. This behaviour also changed some writers’ expectations of me: if I didn’t reply within six hours, say, I’d receive an email or two checking in or, in one case, accusing me of being like “the others”.

I want my job to be about doing good science journalism as much as giving back to the community of science journalists. In fact, I believe doing the latter will automatically achieve the former. We tried this in one way when building out The Wire Science and I think we’ve taken the first steps in a new direction at The Hindu Science – yet these are also drops in the ocean. For a community that requires so, so much still, giving can be so easy that one loses oneself in the process, including on the deceptively trivial matter of replying to emails. Reply quickly and meaningfully and it’s likely to offer a value of its own to the person on the other side of the email server. Suddenly you have a virtue, and because it’s a virtue, you want to hold on to it. But it’s a pseudo-virtue, a false god, created by the expectations of those who deserve better and the aspirations of those who want to meet those expectations. Like it or not, it comes from a bad place. The community needs so, so much still, but that doesn’t mean everything I or anyone else has to give is valuable.

I won’t stop being prompt but I will have to find a middle-ground where I’m prompt enough and at the same time the sender of the email doesn’t think I or any other editor for that matter has dropped the ball. This is as much about managing individual expectations as the culture of thinking about time a certain way, which includes stakeholders’ expectations of the editor-writer relationship in all Indian newsrooms publishing science-related material. (The fact of India being the sort of country where the place you’re at – and increasingly the government there – being one of the first things getting in the way of life also matters.) This culture should also serve the interests of science journalism in the country, including managing the tension between the well-being of its practitioners and sustainability on one hand and the effort and the proverbial extra push required for its growth on the other.

Notes on mindful email use

Recently, Basecamp released an email service, called Hey, many of whose features essentially embody a technological approach to solving one of the biggest problems with email: its users. GMail is versatile, but most people seem to use it in annoying ways (based on the email traffic in my professional inbox). I’ve been using only my email for work for five years or so now, and even before used it over phone to the extent possible. I hate speaking on the phone with people who aren’t at least close friends or family.

However, this seems to be a ridiculous proposition in journalism circles: I’m not sure of the history here but if you have a phone and you’re starting off as a journalist, you’re expected to be reachable – by every Tom, Dick and Harry – by phone. People will call you repeatedly even if you’re not picking, they’ll WhatsApp you next; sometimes, they’ll send you an email and then call you to let you know they’ve emailed you. Sometimes they’ll follow up both with a WhatsApp message saying, “Please don’t forget.” (I’m not a forgetful person – but there’s a first time for everything).

Worst of all, they will share your number with others without asking you; most of them won’t even check whom they’re sharing your number with. They were asked, so they will answer.

Another group that will react to your insistence on using email as if it was a joke is PR people. In 2016, I did a story about TeamIndus with help from their PR team, and to this day, I haven’t been able to get my phone number out of some database PR people share among themselves of numbers of journalists they know. No amount of promises to “do the needful” seems to have the desirable outcome.

At the same time, most of those who do use email use it in ways that suggest they think it’s the opposite of a phone call. Here are some tips (read: desperate pleas) to use email sensibly, especially if the recipient receives scores of emails a day.

  1. “Phone calls cost money, emails are free.” – Emails cost more than money; they cost peace of mind. You shouldn’t hit the ‘compose’ button just because it’s there. Ask yourself if you really need to send the email you’re thinking about. If the answer is ‘yes’, ask yourself if you really need to send a whole new email or if you could tack your message onto an existing email thread. Following three threads with inputs for the same story exacerbates the cognitive demand, and leads to inbox hell.
  2. “Emails are not real-time, and I’m in a hurry.” – This is exactly why email is awesome: so you don’t run around making decisions for the both of us that help only you. I’m not in a hurry to respond because I’ve got my own priorities. If I’m free and it’s still my working hours, I’ll reply as soon as possible (which is often something like 10 minutes); if I’m not but the email seems important, I’ll acknowledge it. If you need a quick reply, the decision has to be a joint one: say so, say by when and – most importantly – say why.
  3. “Emails are not real-time, and I’m in a hurry.” – It’s because you get to make phone calls willy-nilly that you start to assume you’re justified every time you think you’re in a hurry, without waiting to evaluate if the matter is actually urgent or you’re just an impatient time-brat. But often this extends to email, too: unless you’re my boss, simply insisting you’re in a hurry isn’t going to get you anywhere if I’m in a hurry, too.
  4. “I’m just following-up to make sure…” – Dude, email works. If you’ve sent me an email, I’ve got it (unless you’ve spelt my name and/or the organisation ID wrong; in that case the email server will send you a heads-up). Follow-ups are okay if the recipient hasn’t replied for at least 24 hours, or in particularly extenuating circumstances like being promised a reply by a certain deadline and for that deadline to have been missed.
  5. This is an organisation-specific thing, although I suspect it’d apply to many small newsrooms: Don’t cc a bunch of editors if your email only needs the attention of one of them, or you’ll bloat their inboxes with emails they may never need to read, destroy their peace of mind and incur their ire. You can also avoid the bystander effect. If you email three editors, each one will think one of the other two will respond while focusing their attention on the billion other emails that only they can answer.

It doesn’t matter to me that someone else’s inbox has 12,353 unread emails and that that doesn’t affect them. Having more than a couple dozen unread emails at a time stresses me out. And I think it might be better if we all assumed this is the case with all email recipients. The less mindful you become about using email, the more you encourage the recipient to impose an extremely high bar of acceptance on the email’s contents, maybe even reject whatever you’re writing about on the first available excuse.

(The less said about spammy websites the better, although Indian government websites have been particularly awful. One ID shared to IRCTC while booking a train ticket will suddenly mean updates about ‘Mann Ki Baat’, job openings at ISRO and posters from the Indian Army telling me about the perks of signing up.)

How we communicate with each other at work also has a mental-health side that too many people overlook too often. There is no device vibrating furiously on my table, a name wrought bright on the screen, with a green icon insisting I drag it up. There are no single ticks waiting to turn double or grey ticks waiting to turn blue. Many people are able to organise their work lives around phone calls and WhatsApp messages; I find them too intrusive.

However, the act of intruding isn’t the technology’s doing, even if it facilitates the intrusion. Users can often make a decision to be less intrusive, and they need to do so more often.1 They need to remember that there’s a way to use email wrong and that that could have the same effect as phone calls. Inculcating email discipline could also help others use email more peacefully, without having to contemplate paid-for solutions they may not be able to afford just to get away from your habits.

Finally, this is a two-way street: you can’t be an email user in bad faith – never responding to any emails and/or using it in infuriating ways yourself – and expect others to be different. My own pleas are suffixed by what I aspire to offer in return, and in fact what all emails should elicit: broadly, an honest, sound, considered reply.

1. Of course, I write here in the extremely limited context of a well-to-do urban email-user corresponding mostly with others who fit the same description. Smartphones in general are intrusive but we can’t just use them differently and incur the attendant benefits if other people don’t join you and continue using smartphones as usual.