Post #2118875

2025-12-02 22:57 UTC

The hardest thing in academic life is &quot;context switch&quot;. And maybe in other lives here on earth, too. With a packed week, with teaching, unavoidable admin, my own work, and my work with collaborators, not mentioning family life, not only there is little time for each of these things, but when it comes to switch to the next thing there is a significant overhead involved, trying to remember what happened last time and make progress from there. And I didn&#39;t mention email in the above discussion, which is a killer, in many ways. If you respond to all emails, there is literally no time to do the above. If you don&#39;t, then you feel guilty, which impairs the normal development of the above. Initially, email was conceived to make things more efficient. But my practical conclusion is that email, in a workplace, makes things utterly inefficient, by enabling people to create an endless stream of tasks for everybody else, and fast.

Replies (3)

@clemens@mathstodon.xyz 2025-12-02 23:07

@MartinEscardo@mathstodon.xyz but is email better or worse than things like zulip and teams? In my experience it's slightly easier to ignore emails for a while because the history is "linear" and it's easier to catch up than in the case where you are faced with several conversations on zulip that have moved on in your absence.

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@Marekgluza@mathstodon.xyz 2025-12-03 00:59

@MartinEscardo@mathstodon.xyz mastering transitions is the term used in this book https://share.libbyapp.com/title/3469514 which proposes to consider people in a given field who have a 'high performance' and then ask about their process and how they operate. Apparently being able to switch effectively between tasks marks the operation of manh high-performers. I like the book because its premise is how to keep the performance up once one has reached as certain level and not fade or get burned out. Your observation about emails accelerating the dispatching of tasks, somewhat dull delegating, is very thought provoking. From what I heard in top tech corporations people are mindful of each other's time and requests come with at least an estimate of how much time would be asked for. This would appear optimistic as it is something that can be trained but then yah having it implemented would make for a unicorn university.

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@jivan@mas.to 2025-12-04 00:26

@MartinEscardo@mathstodon.xyz Treat work comms (incl. emails) as issue tickets: file/triage them, then address them by priority until you run out of time. Please don't feel obliged to respond to emails unless they're from someone important like your beloved mother-in-law or your boss. Conversations have to end somewhere, and they don't have to end with formalities. Alternatively, they don't have to end cleanly at all. Asynchronous communication is best used just like that: asynchronously.

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