The Matter of Work Gratitude Tagging
A brief notation system for categorizing the gratitude expressed in professional emails has entered its third revision.
The Matter of Work Gratitude Tagging
She had started doing it sometime in the second quarter. In her email client, in the subject line preview, she had begun marking the thanks with small letters: s for sincere, p for performative, and h for the third kind, which she called habitual and which covered most of them.
The h category was for the emails that opened with "Thanks so much for your time today" regardless of what had happened during that time. Meetings that went poorly received the same thanks as meetings that went well. The thanks arrived before the sender had processed the meeting at all. It was not dishonest. It was structural.
p was harder to assign. She had added it for the recognition emails, the ones that named a specific behavior in the first sentence and then described the behavior as an example of something broader. The thanks in those emails was sincere in intention and performative in construction. She had kept the category because she needed somewhere to put them, even if the distinction did not hold up.
s appeared less frequently than she had expected. When she found one, it was usually short and arrived without formatting.
By December she had tagged eleven hundred emails. The tags were stored only in her own notation, in a column in a spreadsheet she had opened for this purpose and nothing else. Nobody knew about the spreadsheet. There was no reason for anyone to know.
The system was not useful in any way she could defend. It was useful in the way that naming something is useful, which is not nothing.
She added a fourth category in early December: r, for reflexive, for the thanks that had been sent because not sending them would have required making a decision about whether to send them, and it was easier to send them than to think about it.
The r category immediately became the largest category.
She had not expected this. She had expected the h category to remain largest. She sat with this for a while. She did not send an email about it.
She tagged the emails she received that day. Most of them were r. Some were h. None were p. One was s, from a colleague she rarely heard from, who had written three sentences about something she had done three weeks earlier and had clearly thought about it before writing.
She left that one unread a little longer than the others. Then she tagged it, and moved on.