This feels like how we should be living

“After careful consideration of your proposal, I will not be attending lunch with you last Friday.”

This is one of several reasons I eventually ditched Facebook... People would text me a bunch of bullshit drama on FB messenger while I was at work and couldn't stop to look at it, then start sending me more messages asking why I wasn't responding lol

I would hate to be a teenager in this day and age. The amount of drama that gets started over shit like you're talking about is insane.

As shitty as Facebook is, Snapchat takes that and dials it up to an 11.

I have it on good info from my 16 year old that it is completely unacceptable to:

Leave a snap (message) unopened for any major length of time. How long is highly subjective.

Open a snap and not respond.

Group chat.

Send a normal message that doesn't include a cringy photo of half your face.

Kids actually get upset over this stuff.

I'm just like, "I have a phone number. You can call or text it. If I feel like talking to you I'll answer. If that's a problem for you, too damn bad."
- Social media was a mistake and a phone camera is the worst invention of our lifetimes.
  
  We destroyed society for absolute shit.
- open a snap and not respond
  
  THIS is the crazy one for me.... I'm not a big user anymore but when I was, my friends and I used it for sending bullshit that didn't require a response. Snapchat is awful for actual conversation
- hi, teenager here, yeah it sucks ass and i lost a lot of friendships over simple petty shit that didn’t matter
  
  they were sensitive and i guess i grew up a bit differently
- And it gets worse than that - my partner is an admin at a high school, and the cyber bullying, filming of fights, and the viral TikTok trends that make students just do overall dumb shit at school is insane. Not to mention the students who have IG pics posing with guns that have a vaguely threatening caption. The teachers and admins have to try and monitor all that, if they can. Luckily a lot of the students who see it first do notify someone. It’s just a whole new world. So glad I didn’t have to deal with that shit when I was in school.
- groupchat is unacceptable
  
  So I’m in my really early 20s so i like to think i still able to relate to the youngings and hip youth but man thats just so odd to me
  
  Tbf me and my friends have always been the weird kids so maybe its that but almost all my communication is either in a discord group chat with my irl buddies and some of their buddies, or a very small server that’s the same plus some of my online buddies.
  
  On the note of being weird I never really got social media like instagram and stuff as I either wanna “follow” topics and following people I don’t know feels odd.
  
  I do see the appeal tho as my sister is super into sports so following some of the big names that might move her forward makes sense to me
  
  I had a point in here at one point but this just turned into a ramble
- I'm a 28 years old asocial individual.
  
  One girl (kinda same age) got highly irritated over me answering 20 minutes after seeing her message (wet hands, rain), and told not to text her again after me being reluctant to answer something romantic with sore throat, food poisoning and sleep deprivation at the same time.
  
  (TBH, I do get a bit nervous when people don't answer me in half an hour or so, but! I'm always conscious of this simply being my own anxiety, not something they are communicating.)
- Wow, that's nuts. I'd be a terrible kid these days if that's the case, because I'm lucky if I check my phone for messages more than twice/day. Usually I check around lunch time, and again when I'm putting off making dinner.
Sorry you posted this 13 minutes ago, and I just responded!

But, there was this person on the internet who was very wrong (not you), and they weren't responding, and it was pissing me off, big time!!!

Sorry again.
- Are y'all seeing the bullshit drama that's starting on Lemmy?! There's a post of a screenshot regarding email response times, and it somehow turned into a fight about Facebook. CRAZYYYY
What it feels like: https://youtu.be/JR8Q-afz170
- This is why I told my family to create a new group chat without me. Plus, it would go off all fuckin day long, when I was in meetings at work, or trying to write code. Group chat should be limited to things that affect the entire group, like a family reunion or something.

One of the principal engineers I used to know had this as theirs:

"I don't always respond to emails on time. If you need me to respond immediately, come to my desk Mon-Wed to say hello. If I'm not there, wait until Mon. If you're in a different country, book a plane ticket the week prior and speak to me on Mon."

The funny part is that they didn't have a desk, and were almost always in a different office to where they were supposed to be.

I should do this. People always materialise at my shoulder the instant I get my headphones going again, and I can’t just blow them off because I have responsibilities.
- Back when I worked in an office I had a coworker who would knock on the desk to get people's attention... I didn't love it
Creatives like artists and engineers really need Maker Time to operate. They got this far in life for a reason.

So basically a business week to respond to everything

edit: stop replying to this to tell me I'm a monster for expecting email to be a thing. I honestly don't care, and all you're doing is telling me you have a weird gen z hangup about email, and that you are a problem at your workplace and that you frustrate your coworkers.

Right!? What kind of email correspondence is this person engaged in that takes them 4 days to process and reply to?

I'd be interested to see their timeline for other forms of communication.
- That's what I am thinking. There are some things that make sense to take while but it seems weird to me to ask for a semi-blank check like this. I have coworkers that are awful at responding (weeks oftentimes) and it's super frustrating.
Yeah, it's just being inconsiderate wrapped up in pseudo-philosophical bullshit. Read the email, gather your thoughts for a minute, type a five minute response. If you're making email more complex than that without a really good reason, take some lessons or something. One of my most useful courses in college had a business email section.
- It really depends on the type of email. Some questions can be answered quite quickly, others are just task assignments in disguise, often for tasks that are really the sending person's responsibility to research on their own.
- Thank you! God some of the people replying to me here need to listen to you. Yeah, email isn't complicated! Like at all.
- Nah.
  
  Do you drop everything to respond to everybody?
  
  Seems miserable to be at everyone's whim and you should reconsider.

What the hell is in those e-mails that requires 2 days of pondering?

Requests for available meeting times. I figure if I drag my feet on scheduling a meeting someone urgently wants to have they'll eventually just email the fucking questions and save us both 90 minutes of pointless bullshit.

I actually made an online meeting request process with a minimum 2-week turnaround just to make scheduling meetings with my department annoying. I only have so much time, and if I honored all requests I'd be spending 60+ hours a week in meetings and none actually doing my job.
- In a project manager. Meetings are my job. If I made my customers wait two weeks to schedule a meeting, I’d be fired. Two weeks to hold it? Maybe. Two weeks to schedule? No.
"Would you please send me that report we talked about? And also let me know which time period you would travel back to if you had a time machine and could only use it once?"
- I'd go back to 2019 and marry my wife again 🥰
- And also let me know which time period you would travel back to if you had a time machine and could only use it once?”
  
  I mean, is there any valid answer aside from the '90s? '80s were cool but still too backwards, plus you still got the cool stuff from then in the later decade, anything before is "I don't want to die of a minor sickness" territory.
I sense a fellow autistic individual
I personally ignore emails with vague responses, especially if they treat email like a text message. Im not interested in instant communication via email.

For example:

"Can we meet?"

Should have answered the 5 Ws and name a time so the email is actionable. Otherwise I'll boomerang it and reply in a few days.
- Yeah but this person isn't simply ignoring it, they eventually answer, allegedly after long consideration.
Eh, I need to find time to fit whatever request came in to my schedule.

This seems really pompous and self important to me. Most people know to not expect an immediate response. I know it’s a joke but to say “it will take me 4 days to acknowledge you” is strange.

While I agree, I understand their sentiment.

Nobody deserves a response.

I tend to surround myself with people who are chill, and immediately drop off anyone who responds/reacts quickly.

I met a person at a meetup and connected. The next day, I had 3 text responses with small talk. Like "Hey what's up?" "What's your day like?" "How is work?" Fuck that, chill. they're a perfect candidate for this.

I accidentally logged on Facebook to fix a permission and almost instantly, I get bombarded with messages that I log off. Apparently me avoiding a message was so hostile that one of them proceeded to call me asking why Im ignoring them. Like damn, chill. I'll message you when I'm ready.
- I am not following. At work you are hired in part to reply to messages (i.e. communicate with your bosses and coworkers)
They gotta have time to watch that 12 hours of tiktok before the respond.

Almost 2 decades ago I figured out that, from the very start in a new job, you have to train others to not expect constant availability and immediate response from you.

Things like "work phone and work e-mail are only for work hours" and only checking e-mails once in a while rather than being a slave-to-notifications interrupting anything I might be doing to check any e-mail coming in and replying to it (if you know the psychology of effective working, externally driven frequent interruptions is one of the most unproductive ways to work and is needlessly stressful).

It's pretty hard getting away with changing this later after people have already baked in expectations about your "availability" (personally, I never succeeded in that), but it works if you're doing this kind of "flow control" up front and reliably do eventually get around to look into and addressing whatever people sent you - in fact you're likely more reliable than those providing "immediate availability" because it's a lot easier to have things under control and naturally prioritise by importance, so important stuff won't just "fall to the bottom of the pile" because a bunch of fresh requests came in distracting you away from the more important stuff and you forgot about it.

There are other, more indirect upsides, such as "shit they can solve themselves" from other people seldom getting to you because they know you won't immediatelly drop everything to solve any problem of theirs, so won't just mail you and sit on their arses waiting and instead have a go or two at it themselves and "self-solving problems" (the kind of stuff that turns out not to be a problem but instead a misinterpretation or are caused by temporary conditions elsewhere and out of your control) solving themselves before you get around to looking into them,

That said, I do have a hierarchy of access, with e-mails being treated as less urgent and phone calls as more urgent, though even in the latter I'll consistently (consistency is important in managing other people's expectations) push back - i.e. "send me an e-mail and I'll look into it when I have availability" - if somebody calls me with stuff that's not important and urgent enough to justify using that "channel".

All this to say that for me what's in this post just looks like a more advanced version of what I do for time management, productivity and stress control.

I learned this when I got into Tech Support and switched to an engineer.

TechSupport. I was on tickets all the time so if you ping me on teams I'd ping back immediately if I was free or within 2 min if I was on a call.

Engineer? Nope. Might get a ping back before lunch if you're lucky. I prefer not to break my concentration scripting. It fucks upy flow.
- Well, that's the thing: in customer facing (even if it's an internal "customer") occupations there's usually no other choice but be driven by external timings, but if you're doing software development or any other kind of thinking/creation work, frequent interruptions just break your concentration, pull you out of Flow (the psychological state of maximum productivity), force you to mentally switch tracks (a form of overhead cost) and often make you lose track of what you're doing, not to mention being a source of unecessary stress.
  
  Unfortunatelly, whilst some are good, plenty of Engineering environments and managers are pretty bad when it comes to recognizing the costs of frequent interruptions and supporting a maximum productivity environment, from the systemic corporate-wide problem which is "open space" work areas to managers who themselves are overstressed firefighters with poor time, impulse and prioritization control, the kind of reactive unstructured behaviour that ends up disrupting everybody else's work flow.

In my experience, it's normal for people to just never respond to emails.

I stopped opening emails about 6 years ago.
Yup. I'm trying to be better about it, but if you actually want me to respond, text or call me. At work, Slack me (only my boss and one coworker has my phone number).

It's interesting to read the comments here. Without taking a stance, it looks like everyone has a different personal experience in terms of how fast their life circle expects them to respond digitally.

I see it as two types of people.

Managers expect quick responses. They jump into meetings. They ask for frequent status updates. They're pissed when you ignore them for a day.

Makers need time to think and create. They code for hours of uninterrupted time. They're generating art or fine tuning a song. Asking for a status update is an interruption, and every interruption isn't a lost moment, but a severe disruption.

You're seeing that in the comments. Some are makers. Some are managers. We both require different things.

You can read more about it here: Makers vs managers schedule

Maybe the answer is to have a proper inbox tray. The business doesn’t really understand that we (as in software developers) don’t even know that email exists. We’re not colour coding everything that comes in and cleaning them up when they’re processed, and we will not see your email amid all the auto-generated crap.

Must be a geologist.

I initially majored in Geology and I can certainly Identify with this sentiment.
- Sediment was right there.....

Here's the thing. If it's from someone internal, we have instant messaging if say u want some kind of message instantly. If I get an email, I'm assuming I have time to action it. If I'm not busy, sure, I'll action it right away, but if I am and I see an email come in from someone internal not marked high importance, there's a good chance I'm not even reading it for like 2-3 hours maybe more. I absolutely hate when someone sends an email and a follow up like an hour later. If it's urgent, u need to convey that in some way, shape, or form.

instant messaging

Yeah, screw that. If it's urgent, call me or walk by my desk. I'll read IMs when I get to them. Not breaking up my workflow for every little thing.
- Eh I'm remote so going to people's desk isn't an option. IM is the closest thing I've got. Imo since Covid, calling someone without IMing 1st to ask if they're free for a call isn't really kosher at least in our office.

Being able to prioritize what needs to be done now and what could take 4 days, and what can simply not be done is an art.

Both on the sender and de receiver.

I totally agree with the dude, but that sounds pretentious af

As any email address will eventually become unusable due to spam.... An email is a very ineffective way to communicate. Eventually every address becomes abandoned

Similar sentiment but a more holistic idea:

“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ― Eugene V. Debs

I don't see the similarity at all.
- There isn't any.

I hate emails. If you aren't using instant messaging for fast communications you are too old to be working in tech.

Need something fast? Slack, teams, whatever crap else is out there.

Want me to sleep on it for 2-3 days? Email.

My work email is so full of crap from internal company emails.

If you aren't using instant messaging for fast communications you are too old to be working in tech.

The meme is about this exact mentality. Fuck instant messaging.

And good luck searching teams, slack, whatever crap that is out there after 6 weeks or so. Or after parent company rebrands/migrates it to something else.

E-mail is the best modern day communication platform. It's agnostic about your OS, client, or service provider. It's not a fucking walled garden where both parties need to have exact same setup to communicate. I can have Thunderbird client working with Gmail and I can send and receive e-mails from people who use neither.

You're just clueless about using it.
- Yeah count me among the "too old" crowd because I like email. If I haven't met you in person and personally given you my phone number, I don't want you texting me. Ever. For any reason. At any time. If a company texts me, I think less of them and will search for an alternative the next time. 98% of the time I get a phone call I let it go to voicemail.
  
  If you want me to see something, email it. With smartphones it takes a literally identical amount of effort to read an email as it does to read a text, with the added benefits that email was designed to send more than 12 characters at a time, can be searched, and can have attachments added to it.
  
  It's also extremely easy to keep your inbox from overflowing with crap. Just don't sign up for the crap in the first place, and when you get an unsolicited email, unsubscribe and/or mark as spam. That does require the bare minimum of computer literacy, which appears to have died out. In a few years the technologically illiterate will say they don't read their texts anymore since they're overflowing with spam that they can't be arsed to avoid signing up for.
I say pick the medium that's going to work best for your situation and use it. Doesn't matter what it is if it works. What I really hate is duplication. Having to send one email to one group, then another email with a special attachment with the SAME INFORMATION to another. Also sending an email out with current update information, and then getting people who I just emailed call me on the phone: "I saw your email, is that estimate accurate?" YESSS! Fuck.
I'm not going to IM someone outside my organization with Teams. F that. Read the freaking e-mail and reply. If you don't answer timely, and I need an answer, I'll call if possible, otherwise escalate.
- Teams doesn't work for outside your organization.
I work with a guy who is too old for tech....he doesn't like sending Teams messages....nor does he like emails. He calls. He calls without warning to ask things like "hey are there two wires at this location?" that can always be answered by looking at the damn wiring diagram i provided.

Carrying a laptop is too hard and opening a PDF on your phone is even harder, I guess. Better call the engineer to make it his problem
- Do what I do. Tell them to hold on while I look it up. Put the phone down for 10 mins. Then after 10 minutes tell them the answer. Make it longer and longer until they bug someone else.
Exactly. My work email is like 95% BS corporate emails, and I just don't check it anymore. I felt bad for the first few months, but there were zero repercussions because actual communication happens on Slack or we mention it in team meetings. Email exists to be searched or to be referenced in another chat system (e.g. hey, I sent you an email with those attachments, forward it as needed).
- My work email is like 95% BS corporate emails,
  
  Skill issue.
  
  Make rules and folders lmao.
- I felt bad as well but I don't anymore. At this point if you want a prompt response and you choose email that's on you. Specially if we're 10-20 steps from each other in the office.