The biggest reason your coworkers don’t respond to your emails

Early on in my career, I was focused on being efficient. I wanted to be productive. I wanted to make an impact. And I thought I had mastered the email game in corporate America. Respond quickly; copy in your boss and others so they know what you’re doing; hold onto emails for documentation and forward them back when people get confused.

“You send too many emails,” my boss said, exasperated, in one of our performance reviews. “From the feedback from your peers, you email a lot. And it’s overwhelming the teams.”

“Aren’t we supposed to be emailing each other?” I asked, confused.

“You’re supposed to be communicating. Not everything needs to be an email.”

My boss was right. Somewhere along the way, I embraced email, became obsessed with email, and treated email like it was my job to email,