Email Conversation Threads - Good or Evil?
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
Have you ever thought that you were losing your mind because someone said they emailed you, and when you looked in your inbox you only found their email by looking through the entire thread of the email? If so, then you probably have Outlook’s “Conversation” view enabled. This view combines emails within the same email chain into one email. So if a colleague sent an email and then someone else sent an email on that same chain, Outlook in this view couples the emails together and only shows one email in your inbox. I personally never use this view because of the very reason that I just described. It’s too easy to miss an email in the middle.
To turn off the Conversation view in Outlook’s desktop version:
Go to the View tab at the top of the screen
Find the Show as Conversations option and uncheck the box to the left of that
Then select the folder you want to apply the Conversations view to
If you have the Outlook app on your phone, you can turn off conversation threads by:
Hit the Home button in the upper left-hand corner (looks like a house in a circle)
Hit the Setting button in the lower left-hand corner (looks like a gear in a circle)
Find Organize mail by thread and turn that option off
If you use Gmail, you can turn off conversation threads by:
Go to the Settings cog in upper right-hand corner
Settings
General
Scroll down to Conversation View
Conversation view off
Save Changes
All of this said, we have not yet answered the question; are conversation threads on email good or evil? Here at Focus to Evolve, we say, "It depends." It depends on your individual role and requirements for email communications. Senior executives we work with who are very rarely in the gritty thick of operational details and to do's typically love the bunching of email threads per chain. So for them, we suggest that email threading is "good." For the entry level employee up through director level folks who still have quite a bit of operational inch-by-inch details to deal with, we strongly suggest that email threads are "evil" because they will eventually lead to missed incoming details.
Please note that to change the settings to group your emails by conversation thread, you can follow these same instructions to turn on conversation thread views as well.
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Productively Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team