Reply All

As bad as the habit of copying everyone is the habit of Replying to All. This is a button that should never have been invented. While it is nice and easy to use, it is almost comical in seeing how people use it. Clearly not thinking, many people fill up others Inboxes with unneeded crap just because it is easier to reply to all than it is to reply to only those specific people who should have received the reply in the first case. Compound the Reply to All with a message that you have received as a CC in the first place and a an unnecessary Thank You into the mix and you have now just received and had to deal with five emails or so where you didn’t need to get any of them. This might be seeming a bit pedantic but when you add this problem up over the day it can be leading to a much larger problem. If you consider how many emails you send versus how many you receive, you get a picture of the size of the problem. In my case I added it up for a few months and found that I was receiving five times as many emails as I was sending. This means that 80% of the emails that I got were not significant enough to warrant even a response. While this may seem trivial, it is the shear volume of emails that people are getting, in my case 80% of them, that are making people feel overwhelmed and out of control at work.