Kill Reply All

Description

Want to Marie Kondo your digital life and develop a more tactful approach to technology? By a leading tech and digital culture journalist, Kill Reply All is a guide to tidying it all up. 
 
How do you reply to your colleague’s weird email? What would Emily Post say about your Tinder profi le? And just how do you know if you’re mansplaining? In this irreverent journey through the murky world of digital etiquette, Wired’s Victoria Turk provides an indispensable guide to minding our manners in a brave new online world, and making peace with the platforms, apps, and devices we love to hate.
 
The digital revolution has put us all within a few clicks, taps, and swipes of one another. But familiarity can breed contempt, and while we’re more likely than ever to fall in love online, we’re also more likely to fall headfirst into a raging fight with a stranger or into an unhealthy obsession with the phones in our pockets. If you’ve ever encountered the surreal, aggravating battlefields of digital life and wondered why we all don’t go analog, this is the book for you.“Victoria Turk’s Kill Reply All: A Modern Guide to Online Etiquette, From Social Media to Work to Love is one of the more amusing digital-etiquette books you’ll read. Simply put, social media has created a new universe of ways we can be mean to one another. So digital good manners are a great kindness, whether they apply to friends, work or love.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Don’t get cancelled, check out Kill Reply All by Victoria Turk instead. This helpful field guide to all things social media will teach you everything you need to know about email etiquette, online dating, mansplaining and the ins and outs of being an upstanding digital citizen in the 21st century.”
—Engadget

“[Turk] has a flair for humorous writing and her anecdotes are as entertaining as they are constructive. There is a charming British tilt to Turk’s advice, including a brief section entitled ‘How do you address an email to the Queen?’… Kill Reply All will speak to those who grew up in the analog era but who have, for better or worse, wholly embraced the technology revolution. It picks up where etiquette experts like Emily Post left off, providing a necessary counterpoint to the wild west nature of the smartphone-dominated digital age.”
—Shelf Awareness

“The ultimate guide to online etiquette.”
—Parade.com

“Victoria is a delightful writer, and anyone with questions about how to behave online absolutely needs this book.”
—Medium

“This manual may seem tongue-in-cheek, but it actually offers valuable advice on minding your digital manners… this tome is a must for anyone who uses their hands to communicate—so basically, everyone.”
—Star Magazine

“No more wrangling a bloated inbox. No more tangled message threads. No more angling for forgiveness on communication if you read Kill Reply All. For every businessperson who wants to do right and do better, this book will be a hit.”
—The Bookworm Sez

“[Turk] playfully updates etiquette protocol for the modern era with this helpful guide… While this digital-age primer will be of most interest to those who didn’t grow up with the internet, even online natives will find Turk’s savvy advice a joy.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A clever and informative guide to online etiquette.”
—BookpageVictoria Turk is the features editor at Wired UK, where she oversees long-form stories and writes regularly for print and web. Before working at Wired, she was the technology editor at New Scientist and the UK editor at Motherboard, Vice’s tech and science channel.

INTRODUCTION

 

On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog-but that’s no excuse for poor manners.

 

Etiquette might sound like an old-fashioned idea in modern times, but it’s about a lot more than knowing which fork to use. It is the social glue that binds us together, the code that lets us easily communicate without misunderstanding one another or causing offense. It helps us to avoid awkwardness and show respect to others, all while presenting ourselves in the best possible light.

 

But all too often, good manners seem to dissolve in the glare of a smartphone screen or the clicking of a keyboard. This isn’t (usually) out of any malice; the problem is that there’s very little consensus on what constitutes good conduct in the digital world. You might know your way around a dinner party, but how confident are you on the etiquette of iMessage groups? Does your Tinder profile meet generally accepted standards of decorum? And where does one even begin with social media? Any guidance on the correct usage of memes is conspicuously absent from my copy of Debrett’s . . .

 

It’s no wonder we’re all confused. Behind our screens, communication is often conducted through text, meaning it doesn’t benefit from social cues such as facial expressions and body language. Communication is rarely truly private, increasing the potential for embarrassment, and it almost always leaves a digital trail-all the better to capture a permanent record of your every indiscretion.

 

In the 1990s, people used to talk about “netiquette” to describe a kind of general internet code of conduct. But as more and more of our interactions move online, we need more nuance. Context is critical: you wouldn’t behave the same in an email to your boss as you would in a Snapchat message to your crush (or at least I hope you wouldn’t). And as technology evolves, so too does our behavior. Famed etiquette author Emily Post never had to consider how best to slide into someone’s DMs, or deal with the exquisite agony of being left on read.

 

This book sets out to illuminate digital etiquette across the four major spheres of everyday life: work, romance, friendship, and community. As well as offering practical advice, it reflects on some of the quirks of modern digital culture and the behaviors we have developed to navigate these treacherous times. As technology moves on and customs change, it can be hard to keep up, but the basic pillars of good manners remain the same. Good etiquette means putting other people’s comfort first. It means having empathy and patience, and generally just not being a jerk.

 

Keep these basic tenets in mind and we can bring ourselves one step closer to the impossible: being nice to one another on the internet.

 

1

 

PLEASE TAKE ME OFF

THIS THREAD

 

THE ART OF WORK

 

FIVE GOLDEN RULES

 

1. Reduce email at all costs.

 

2. An empty inbox is the path to enlightenment.

 

3. Assume that everyone you email is smarter

and busier than you.

 

4. Reply all at your peril.

 

5. There is no excuse to leave a voicemail.

 

We spend most of our waking hours at work, and in many workplaces, the majority of that time is spent staring at screens. One particular medium has come to dominate office communication: email. It’s probably the first thing you check when you start your workday and the last thing you do before you leave. It is the bane of the modern condition, and on that basis it is here that we shall begin our study of digital etiquette.

 

Things weren’t always like this. Email has its roots way back before the internet as we know it, when American programmer Ray Tomlinson wrote some code that allowed users to send messages between computers on the ARPANET system (the precursor to today’s internet) in the early 1970s. Tomlinson, who died in 2016, said he developed the system because it “seemed like a neat idea” and maintained that the first emails he sent were so insignificant he had forgotten them. I’m sure we can all relate.

 

It’s undeniable that email has had a transformative effect on work culture. Without it, we’d never know the joy of working remotely, sharing ideas across continents, or passive-aggressively cc’ing the boss when dealing with an annoying colleague. But I think we can all agree that email is completely out of control. It no longer helps us do work; it is work. It may have freed us from the physical confines of the office, but mentally we can never leave. Email is distracting, time-consuming, and intensely stressful.

 

This is where etiquette can help. The majority of the stress around email can be attributed to a lack of consensus on how to use it. How quickly must you respond to an email? How do you strike the right tone? And is there a law somewhere that says every message must begin “Sorry for the late response”?

 

Together we shall dissect the ins and outs of proper email protocol, from subject line to sign-off. We shall resolve once and for all when email is the correct medium to use and consider alternative workplace communications, such as conference calls, instant messaging tools, and (steel yourself) LinkedIn. Once you’re done with this chapter, just leave it lying conveniently open on the desk of that one person in the office who still hasn’t gotten their head around the unwritten rules of reply all.

 

Office email

 

The paradox of email is that it’s simultaneously very convenient and utterly exhausting. It’s often the most expedient way of getting things done, and yet it just seems to take up so much time.

 

If you’re feeling the crunch, you’re not alone. In one study presented at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in 2016, researchers asked forty office workers to wear a heart-rate monitor for twelve days and log their computer use during this time. The workers checked their email an average of seventy-seven times a day and spent almost an hour and a half dealing with it. Sure enough, their heart data showed that the longer they spent on email within a given hour, the more stressed they were during that time. And the longer they spent on email each day, the less productive they felt they had been.

 

Given that email is such a universal horror, good email etiquette really revolves around one thing: reducing it as much as possible. A considerate emailer strives to take up as little of their recipient’s time and energy as they can. They email only when strictly necessary and take pains to make their messages as easy to deal with as possible. A considerate emailer understands that the best email is the one they don’t actually send.

 

THE LIFE-CHANGING MAGIC OF

TIDYING UP (YOUR INBOX)

 

Before you can even think about sending emails to other people, you need to get your own house in order. After all, you can’t hope to reduce the greater burden of email on the world if your own inbox is a digital dumping ground that threatens to engulf you with the next ping! of a notification. And if you’re barely treading water in a quicksand of unread messages, you could easily miss the one you actually need to respond to.

 

Do a quick internet search and you’ll find that email management strategies are as abundant and diverse as fad diets-often with similarly unsatisfying results. There are entire self-help books dedicated to this topic, of which this is not one, so I’ll cut to the chase and give you the only advice you need to bother with.

 

Sound too good to be true? Let me introduce you to Inbox Zero.

 

I am an Inbox Zero disciple. Those of us who have found inner inbox peace just can’t stop ourselves from evangelizing on the matter in an effort to save other poor souls from email purgatory. In my job as a magazine editor, I once found myself having to entertain a famous sports star before a photo shoot. These forced moments of interaction are always stilted, and the conversation soon petered out into awkward silence-until I asked, “Have you heard about Inbox Zero?” (He had not, but I think I converted him.)

 

So what is Inbox Zero? The term was coined by blogger, podcaster, and all-round productivity type Merlin Mann, who first laid out the strategy in several posts on his 43 Folders blog in 2006 and then in a Google Tech Talk in 2007. In these, Mann shares a simple way to triage your emails so they don’t keep stacking up. Think of him like Japanese tidying-up guru Marie Kondo, except he’s helping declutter your inbox instead of your sock drawer.

 

The driving idea of Inbox Zero is to keep your inbox empty by processing every email in some way as soon as you read it.

 

A few clarifications before you have a panic attack: this does not mean processing every email as soon as it arrives, nor does it mean answering every email. The point is that when you choose to read an email, you should do something with it, so that it doesn’t just keep haunting your inbox, making you feel guilty. “If I had to sum it up in one phrase, I would say that if you can find the time to check email, you must also use that time to do something with that email,” Mann tells me.

 

Still not convinced? Follow these three simple steps to embark on your own life-changing journey:

 

1. Start with a clean slate

 

Depending on your current email habits, this may require quite a brutal deep-clean. The sensible, grown-up way to do this would be to take some time to sit down and click through each unread message, deleting or responding as appropriate until you’ve cleared the decks. But let’s be realistic. There’s only really one thing for it: select-all + delete. Done.

 

If you struggle to let things go, you could move all of your unread emails into a separate folder to go through at a later date, or archive them instead. But if these emails have been kicking around unread for a while, it’s unlikely they’re that important-and if they are, people will find a way to contact you. They’ll send another email. They’ll mention it next time they see you. They’ll call you on the phone (shudder).

 

Now, take a moment to revel in your new, squeaky-clean inbox. Congratulations, you have no new emails! Don’t get too comfortable, however, because now the real work starts.

 

2. Turn off notifications

 

Or at least most of them. One reason email is the scourge of our working lives is that it’s constantly distracting us from other things. You just get into your groove on a project and-ding!-your train of thought is rudely interrupted by Becky from finance, reminding you about the charity bake sale this afternoon. In one case study, researchers found that it took an average of sixty-four seconds for workers to get back on task after checking their email (and that’s not including the time spent actually reading or dealing with the emails). Check your inbox every ten minutes over an eight-hour stretch and that’s more than fifty minutes of your working day spent just getting your head back into the zone after switching tasks.

 

Check your email on your own terms instead. Set your inbox to retrieve email at a specific interval rather than every time a new message arrives.

 

3. Only read each email once

 

Whenever you do check your inbox, the important thing is that you actually do something with the contents. As per Mann’s mantra, “Your job is not to read an email and then read it again.” Upon reading, he recommends immediately taking one of five actions: delete, delegate, respond, defer, do.

 

EXTRA EMAIL MANAGEMENT PRO TIPS FOR THE TRUE INBOX NEAT FREAK

 

Not got your fix? Keep your inbox spotless with these bonus techniques:

 

Unsubscribe from all the newsletters you once enthusiastically signed up for but never actually read-these have a tendency to rapidly breed if left unsupervised.

 

Set up automatic filters. Your email client probably already does this for spam, but you can set up your own rules to divert emails from certain senders or containing certain keywords straight to a designated folder, so they don’t clog your inbox.

 

Organize inbox folders by deadline, not subject. This way you can easily prioritize the emails you’ve deferred.

 

Stop people emailing you in the first place by making your email address hard to find. Says Mann, “Only an animal has their raw email address sitting out in public anymore.”

 

The first one-“delete”-is easy. If you have an email that is obviously rubbish, or that you don’t need to do anything with after reading, then just get rid of it. Archive it instead of deleting if you want to keep it for reference purposes. “Delegate” is also pretty simple: if it’s someone else’s concern, forward the email and be done with it. And “respond” isn’t as scary as it sounds. If an email requires a fast response, just do it.

 

Once you’ve completed these steps, you’ll probably be surprised at how little remains. The rest of the emails-the ones that actually require some real work-fall into the “defer” and “do” categories. Choosing when and how to defer is the trickiest. Mann suggests moving deferred emails into a specific “to-do” folder so that you can keep track of them without clogging your main inbox. Just be mindful that you also work through that folder regularly; lingering emails are still lingering emails, regardless of how diligently you’ve filed them.

 

Put these points into practice and you’ll wonder how you ever managed before. Just one word of warning: it is possible to get a bit too carried away with keeping an empty inbox, to the point that it defeats the whole purpose of the exercise. After all, Mann says, “the point of this is not to obsess about getting to zero. The point is to do less obsessing.”

 

When to send an email

 

It used to be that you’d leave your desk at five p.m. and would be uncontactable until nine a.m. the next morning. Now that we’re all carrying mini computers in our pockets, however, there’s a general assumption that we should all be digitally reachable at just a moment’s notice.

 

But just because we can send emails at any time of the day or night doesn’t mean we should (indeed, knowing the difference between “can” and “should” is pretty much the definition of good manners).

 

So insidiously has work email crept into our private lives that France has gone so far as to legislate against it, granting workers a “right to disconnect” (droit ˆ la dŽconnexion) that essentially enshrines in law a French employee’s right to ignore their boss’s emails and calls out of hours. The law, which went into effect in 2017, doesn’t dictate exactly how employers should restrict workers’ use of digital tools, but it stipulates that companies should come up with a policy, agreed upon with employees, to limit digital encroachment into workers’ personal and family lives. As I believe Robespierre once said: LibertŽ, ŽgalitŽ, email-free.

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