That’s pretty obvious. A lot of emails you just glance at and archive. But some are talking directly to you, and often literally asking you to respond. Same thing, you can just hit archive if you want. Everything is a choice. You might be missing an opportunity. You might be being rude. But we make those same choices through other actions all the time.
I thought of it this weekend because I chose to respond to an email that was really on the fence (between me just archiving and me sending a probe response). The email was vague about an opportunity. The response we vague again. I responded again (oh god, my ad). The response was again woefully lack in detail. I responded again (I’m the worst) basically telling them this was silly and I’m done. They seemed offended. I should archived the first one, and I definitely should have archived all the rest of them.
3 responses to “You literally don’t have to answer any particular email.”
But if not worth keeping, you gotta just delete! Archiving crappy emails hurts my heart like nails on the chalkboard.
Interesting! I’m an “archive everything” kinda guy. Especially if the email was hand-written by a person to me. I really like to be able to search and get a complete history of correspondence.
Makes sense. There is something satisfying to me though that if it’s a very low quality email or exchange I just delete never to be seen again. That’s like the 3/10 and below emails. Feels final, cleaning, like there’s an island out there of misfit archived emails and there’s only so much room on it. If it’s even middle-of-the-road I will archive to be searched later.