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When Can I Expect an Email Response?
An anonymous reader writes "Ever sit there waiting for an email response and wonder what's going on? Did they get it? Did it get filtered? A study looks at the responding habits of a large group of corporate users. They find, among other things, that users would try to 'project a responsiveness image. For example, sending a short reply if a complete reply might take longer than usual, intentionally delaying a reply to make themselves seem busy, or planning out timing strategies for email with read receipts.' Tit-for-tat, 'Users would try to reciprocate email behaviors -- responding quickly to people who responded quickly to them, and lowering their responsiveness to people who responded slowly to them in the past.'"
...anymore. you never respond to my comments.
"If you don't have eyes you shouldn't have wings" -- Carl Pilkington
I just the other day got...an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday.-Ted Stevens, honorable US Senator from Alasak
See, it's not that people time e-mails to make themselves look busy, it's that the tubes get full!
sigfault. core dumped.
because the email is down due to clogged vacuum tubes.
"Nothing for you to see here..."
...waiting ... for ... message
The irony is delicious.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I look forward to your future comments.
if I claimed I was emperor just because some watery tart lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!
The first comment to the article on that page is awesome and must be shared:
some additional behaviors that I've seen while working at a 30+ person startup:
- certain people respond to all emails in person, by getting up to talk to them or yelling across cubicles
- certain people prefer to communicate by email even when the recipient is sitting right next to them
- there is another group of people who send very few work-related emails, but who send interesting and/or funny emails to the entire company now and then.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I have 8 people that work in my Unit. When I send out an email to the group needing an immediate response, I know that only 2 will respond right away (assuming they are at their desk). The rest of them check their email at different frequencies. The little notice they get apparently does not stimulate their curiosity as it does mine. One of them will check each hour. I have one person that will check it each morning and that is it. So if you need an answer before that, you have to call him.
I'm not. Frankly, I would have guessed this, especially considering that this is _corporate_ america, where looking busy can be more beneficial than doing good work. It is interesting how people would send an email and then keep checking "constantly" for a response. Why not just pick up a phone (or walk to the next cubicle in some cases) if you are that concerned about the message? Reciprocating, however, is ... odd; What do all the OCD emailers do the first time they contact someone?
I know for me personal vs business is a whole matter. I'm a project manager for an architecture firm. During the day I'll recieve maybe 15 ligit e-mails, 5 of which may involve some type of emergency on someones part. Our industry is such where when you do get a communication from a client, public official etc. it ususally requires immediate action on my part, or on teh part of my design team. So as a rule of thumb I dont' answer my e-mails in order. I review them address the emergencies first. Then scheduel the unimportant e-mails for a slow day, say a friday.
The ironic thing is many of our clients never answer e-mails, however there e-mails must be answered immediately. So my answer teh the question, is importance and hierarchy. If your e-mail is to someone who is more important that you on the project chain don't expect a responce. hwoever visa versa, expect an immediate responce.
The same applies to improtance. ohh yea, the importance flag in outlook is of no use whatsoever because an emergency on your part, doesnt' mean an emergency on mine, unless your a client in which case see above.
"Email means that someone can ignore you instantly"... this after sending 25 emails and making 10 phone calls to someone else in the organization, and that person's supervisor, and the supervisor's supervisor.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I have a rough rule of responding to every email within 3 hours. If that's unreasonable I flag the email to start popping up notifications. Since I started doing this I have noticed that people I correspond with at work tend to be much more responsive. Even if you send back a quick reply saying something like "I'm busy and will deal with your issue later/tomorrow/whatever" it's better than not acknowledging the email until you can fully deal with whatever it contains. I actually started this because people sucked at getting back to me and it was pissing me off and I didn't want to be that person that other people were pissed at because it seemed like they were ignoring emails. I hate that person.
Is there a name for this??
...
Reciprocating Behavior Norms??
Someone get a psychologist in here quick!!!
I know I'm guilty of it. Quick responders get the same. Lollygaggers (??) get to wait.
Hates those lollygaggers
"Ever sit there waiting for Slashdot post and wonder what's going on? Did they post it? Did it get ad-blocked? A study looks at the posting habits of a small group of Slashdot editors. They find, among other things, that editors would try to 'project a responsiveness image. For example, posting a short summary if a complete summary might take longer than usual, intentionally duping a story to make themselves seem busy, or planning out timing strategies for posts.' Tit-for-tat, 'Users would try to reciprocate posting behaviors -- responding quickly to people who responded quickly to them, and lowering their responsiveness to people who responded slowly to them in the past.'"
Somewhere along that post, I got bored and just did a copy-paste. Feel free to correct it later.
One thing that contributes to that is Lotus Freaking Notes' brilliant feature of checking email, putting up an alert when you get new mail BUT NOT ACTUALLY DISPLAYING IT IN YOUR INBOX, thus forcing you to break your activity to make sure it's not something that can't be ignored.
As with much of Lotus Freaking Notes, this is a) an interface issue that was ironed out by the rest of the developer world 20 years ago and b) would have taken maybe 15 seconds longer to code properly than it did to do it wretchedly.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
At my company, almost everything is done by email. Most messages are responded to nearly immediately, and so everybody's expectation is that email is more of a conversation than something that will be looked at in 24 hours (may as well be 24 years).
Of course, little actually gets done since interruptions are contstant. Seriously, probably 2/3 of my time is allocated to just sending and receiving emails. And I work in a major, highly profitable company. I just don't understand how we do it.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
Email response is all about priority. If I have 20 new emails in de morning but my phone doesn't stop ringing then the emails will have to wait. But I do my work in a support environment, there is always a fire somewhere. I can assume that a code-monkey who spends his time writing the latest and greatest new program can maybe concentrate on his job at hand for a few hours before dealing with emails. You have to avoid the trap of being caught in an endless cycle of writing emails to each other without getting any actual work done.
As for asshats who write an email and then come to my desk 15 minutes later asking why I have not responded yet: well if it was THAT important why didn't you come to me directly...
The internet is not a truck, you can't just fill it up. The internet is a series of tubes!
Personally, I think email replies strategies are consistent for individuals, but I haven't seen a general rule that applies to people in general. For example, there are some people I email that always reply promptly while others do not. And some people tend to send detailed emails while others never write more than two or three sentences. I think this has more to do with general philosophies of work and the importance of email as a means of communication to the individual. Some people are always "too busy" to bother, and others simply prefer face time (either because of accountability or because they find email exchanges awkward).
Thanks for sending me an email. I'm taking a short break today, Wednesday 8/30. In my absence, please talk to KaraM about the MxTK project, JuhnA for workflow issues, or HiuS for general questions.
"Ever sit there waiting for an email response and wonder what's going on? Did they get it? Did it get filtered?"
XMPP would take care of that problem.
I've massively cut back my response times to email, and deliberately so. Maybe five times a day I'll go through and reply now, sometimes maybe three.
Instant messenger I tend to reply to...well...instantly. Even if it's only to say that I'll have to answer in a couple of minutes. Your best bet for getting hold of me is a phone message. Why will sound familiar to many. I was getting so distracted and interrupted by email that I turned off any notification that I'd received any. From then on, I found I was able to concentrate on my work a lot more.
What's been interesting is that people I regularly correspond with have noticed this and fitted in with the pattern fine. I don't think they've consciously done it - they've clearly learned how to get hold of me if they need to, and what kind of response times to expect otherwise. It's beneficial all round really - the key is that the two methods of getting hold of me quickly are interactive methods - phone or IM. This cuts down misunderstandings, stops people wasting time formulating the perfect email to send me because they can just get through it in a normal conversational style, adds informality as we're able to use a spot of humour whilst discussing whatever needs doing...it's just better. IRC aside, flamewars are more common in email than in IM. And phone-based flamewars? When's the last time you ever heard of one, if ever? Personal contact always mitigates such behaviour.
So email is no longer a quick way to reach me at work. It's a conscious choice, and it's worked out absolutely fine.
Cheers,
Ian
I'm surprised they didn't mention the people who are black holes. You send them emails, they read them, but they do nothing until you walk over there and prod them to see if they have read it and only then will they give you an answer.
I've tried all sorts of things to coax an answer out of people like this through email... writing shorter messages which only ask one yes/no question, writing longer ones, etc etc nothing I try seems to be able to make them type that damn reply.
Not only all the behaviours from TFA, but also those noted in your post, are exactly as they were back in the snailmail era. Only the medium has changed.
Back when I was a lad, we had actually write with pen on paper, address envelopes, lick our own stamps, and trudge to the post office uphill both ways in a snowstorm! you kids have it easy, what with email to do all the dirty work. Think of the galoshes makers!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Send them your spam, I'm sure they'll respond faster or /. there server whichever is faster
Or we might leave that to medical professionals and keep doing tech stuff.
you never respond to my comments.
You only give me your funny mod points...
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Is there some kind of etiquette involving read receipts that I don't know about?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
That tit-for-tat really works for email. The more I respond to those viagra offers the faster they send me more of them!!!
Its also really interesting, how people behave when you send them a job application: they just wont send a reply, even if you send another shit-friendly email, you can do whatever you want, they just wont effin' reply to your emails/whatever! No way!!! I'm sorry, beeing unemployed just totally sucks...
Like cancer or AIDS? Just a thought.
Because everyone knows that research in one discipline never proves useful in other disciplines. Thank God knowledge is inherently categorized into "useful" and "unuseful" boxes, so we can easily dismiss research that is a waste of time.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Not a study, but I did write about it...
b itch-and-so-am-i.html
"When I send somebody an e-mail, I expect them to respond. One day is nothing. Two days if you're busy, I can understand and appreciate that. Three days is rude, and anything beyond that is stupid. We're not talking about sitting down to write an essay here, some grand quest to prove to everyone that you do actually know how to spell, use grammar, punctuation, and occasionally capitalize letters. I'm talking about a simple "Sorry, I don't have any information about that." How hard was that? It takes a few seconds to read, a few to comprehend, and a few more to pen an answer.
Seriously, what is the point of having e-mail if you aren't going to use it? How can you ever expect it to be useful when you treat it with all the responsibility of a two-year-old? When the phone rings, you answer it. You wouldn't for a second think about letting it ring, figuring they'll just call back in a few weeks. And what the hell makes you think you're so special that someone who obviously wants something from you is going to find it acceptable that you made them wait days if not weeks to be blessed with your response?
This past week, I sent an e-mail to an executive producer for a TV show that airs on the SCI FI channel. I'm pretty sure I sent that on either a Friday or a Saturday night, and got a reply on Monday. That's fine, business and all that. I pinged him back, and within minutes got another reply. He was obviously sitting right there still dealing with his mail, and I appreciated him taking the time to help me out with something. But that's the rub, I appreciated him not taking a month to get back to me, something that otherwise should be baseline. It should be commendable that you answer your email within hours, not that you answered it at all." [...]
Rest is over here - http://bitch-what.blogspot.com/2006/08/e-mail-is-
http://about.me/paultenny
FROM: Potamus, Peter
TO: Falcone, Blue
SUBJECT: That thing I sent you!
Did you get that thing I sent you?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I've noticed that government employees never respond at all. Everything from my school's network admin to senators.
I did get a reply from Hillary Clinton though. It was an automated response saying she was too busy to read my email. I guess that doesn't really count though, does it?
Cripes, what is funny about this is that I have already metmodded posts from this topic.
Anyway, when I first started in business, which was a surprisingly long time ago given what I'm about to say, the head of our company met with every new hire and, among other things, said this:
Respond to every voice-mail within one hour, and respond to every e-mail within one day.
I have always taken that as a maxim of business communication. Professionals should respond in those timeframes, or else you need to assume (a) something went wrong with the transmission (this covers a lot of professional gaffes, which is good when the person you are accusing is your client), or (b) they have been too busy to respond (which means you should "annoy" them anyway -- busy people like to be gadflied with important items), or (c) they are intentionally ignoring you, which means you should assume #1 or #2 anyway.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Your PHB wants you to cc'd him on every email when contacting people related to the project but outside the department to make absolutely certain you're not conspiring with someone to get him fire.
That was fun. I did that for six months before getting another job. Why was I required to do this? Turns out my PHB was lying to people outside the department, and, since I didn't know that and wouldn't care anyway, my habit of documenting everything related to my project got him in hot water. He got annoyed when I kept telling people I couldn't answer their questions and that they need to call him directly.
Ok, mod me down if you must, but I'm genuinely interested in this.
I work for a company in the UK which works with a company in the States. Sometime I have to email fairly technical (ie its about source code and programming in general) messages to my counterpart in the States. To make the process as simple as possible I spend some time breaking my question(s) into pieces, numbering them, and making them clear and hopefully straight-forward. The American company practically *always* only replies to the first point in the email. If their reply addresses the problem, we still have all the others to go through, as could be seen if they'd been read at the time the first one was.
I've had this with a couple of other companies which are based in the US, and even in the company I'm talking about I've emailed several different people with the same response.
Is this a widespread practice? And if so......why?
ARRRRRGGGGHHHH! I can't stand these. I hate them times a million. I have one vendor that wants a receipt sent when I DELETE their message. (I'm CC'd only, I'd yell if I could). I, as a rule, never send receipts back. Never. Not to my boss, no one. If you want to know that I got your message, call me and speak to me. That's a pretty good way to verify, and say, while you're at it; maybe you could just tell me what's up. If you want the aloofness and lack of immediacy of email, then I'm sorry, you don't get to immediately know when I've read your message.
blarg.
Well sometimes they don't respond to your internets because they haven't gotten them yet. I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday.
See, sometimes them tubes get clogged and that slows down your internets quite a much!
I've dealings with an E-store that is going to deliver some anime books to me, however for the last week I have yet to receive a response, my package has not been sent according to the site but I've 0 response with them. It's horrid.
Personally if you're in the service industry a fast response gets you more business. A response "we'll get back to you with in 24 hours" is all most people need right away. It shows you're worthy of doing business.
If you ignore people you'll lose business obviously and a delayed response is just as bad as ignoring people.
Some companies have made me very happy. I got a form letter from Namcobandai, but Nippon Ichi Software America gave me a personalized letter (probably a form letter for Disgaea, but the opening was personalized to my letter).
It's not hard to do this. The problem is saying "It will take time" but the fact is no one wants to wait forever, it's always better to solve the problems right away but no one ever said too much true correspondence is a bad thing.
Then again I'm sure that is how spam got started.
We're the Cut'n'paste generation. We don't really think about what we write before putting 'pen to paper' anymore for the following reasons:
1. You can cut'n'paste you sentances to make some resemblance of ordered thought.
2. You can get a quick response, so if you're imprecise, you'll know about it quicker.
So basically latency has plummeted, but we're probably less efficient at doing things than we used to be before all this 'new fangled technology'.
Am I going to read this comment through? Do a spellcheck? nope, I'm going to spin in out, with it's imprecision, flaws and ambiguity, for I know that someone else will pick up on those point very rapidly and therefore I do not need to bother...
I ignore them until I want an interrupt, then I deal with them in the priority *I* give them. I do not acknowledge how important you think it is (or how important you think you are). If they come to my desk, I tell them "I'm in the middle of something, and will get to your email/call soon".
Maybe the person didn't get it yet. Mail can be delayed for many different reasons. A spam fighting technique is to use greylisting. Some mail servers will simply queue the tempfail and not try again for a few hours, or maybe not until tomorrow. SMTP servers will guarantee delivery. They won't guarantee delivery in a few seconds.
So what is the "responsiveness image" presented by this article, considering it's an anonymous submission linking to a Wordpress blog that appears to have been created soley for the purpose of presenting a 2nd-hand discussion of a paper published 3 years ago? The part that really confuses me is the lack of ads.
I tend to reply as quickly as I can (that might depend on a lot of factors), but I never take into account how slowly someone responded. Just because (for example) someone doesn't have any respect for me to convey a timely reponse to me via email/sms/im/pm, doesn't mean I need to lower myself to that level.
I hate people that never respond. Sometimes they justify it as they were only CC'ed not in the main To:. Or they were one of a small list of recipients in the To:, even if the first listed.
I hate people that put return receipts on everything they send out. They get pissed when you elect not to send the return receipt.
I hate people who will copy a great number of people in an organization that aren't remotely involved with an issue just to point out that someone in the organization did something wrong. I usually reply-all to the originator with great condescension.
I hate people who prefer to give work instruction to you in person or over the phone or even IM instead email. They don't want to trouble even though I need the accountability.
It only mildly annoys me when someone forwards something to you that you were on copy of originally. All they had to do was look at who all the note was sent to.
Someone hates these cans.
IMHO the world needs a reminder that email is asynchronous. I have seen the reply-fast-to-email strategies that some employ do more harm than good. In fact I blame this for all of the reply-all mishaps I have seen over the years. Can everyone please set their email client to check for new messages every 60 to 90 minutes and help re-pace the world on this issue. I hope this will start to erase the few words meaningless messages that can add to the weight of an INBOX such as "thanks man" or "ok, I'lll check". Seriously, with technologies like IM and Presence now evolving to workable standards I think this would be wise. As soon as the closed IM networks model shatters (see skype, AOL, MSN.NET, etc...) we'll all be better off with realistic expectations around email. Email is great, I do not need to install Lotus to receive a message from your Lotus Notes system. When that is true for other communications, such as instant messaging moving to SIP and Jabber I will be happier. I should not need to install Skype to use voice over IP or IM with you. What a waste of time (like posting gripes to message boards).
..that it is the subject that defines the response time. As long there is something to be earned everyone will respond quickly. When I get a bug report I always try to reply ASAP. Even if I have no clue on what the problem is, I respond with a guess and the assurance that I will look into the problem. Thus I improve the chances of getting into a meningfull conversation and sorten out the details of the problem. On the other hand, I still have responded to my Free For Life P0rn Membership, Update Paypal Account, or Internet Lottery Awards mails...
http://recordmydesktop.iovar.org
Hi Eln,
Thanks so much for your prompt response. This is now urgent! I'm cc'ing all of the dev managers and the VPs of developments so that we can all track your responses to this issue. Please respond to all ASAP!!!
Oh, can we set up a meeting tonight at 8pm to discuss your findings? I've added this to everyone's calendar - I realize that this is short notice, but attendance is mandatory.
If anyone has any thoughts, ideas, random musings, opinions, or collateral information please respond.
Thanks everyone!
Bob
Senior SCSSACP
TPS report generation, QLDT division
AGAAP
email: bob@corp.com
fax: 1-212-212-1212
Mobile: 1-212-212-1223
Telex: TP-10925645
Pager: bob7979797@pagingservice.com
GPS coordinates: N36 06.285', W114 46.655'
IM: hotlovr69@msn.com
What I'm currently listening to: Mr. T - Respect yo Mama
The opinions epressed in the above email represent my opinion and do not represent the opinion of my company or management. This communication from corp.com may contain forward looking statements or confidential information and must not be forwarded or archived.
--
THIS MESSAGE WAS SENT FROM MY BLACKBERRY
--
THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN SCANNED BY AVG-PRO AND FOUND TO BE VIRUS FREE
Personally when I'm at work I only look at my emails about once or, if I get really bored, possibly twice, a day. With my private email accounts it's now got to the point where it may be as little as once a week. There's just that much crap being transmitted by email that I can barely be bothered to use it at all any more.
:) as I simply can't be bothered reading it. It's somewhat depressing really as everyone is aware of the problem and if there's actually important information in one of these mails then either a telephone call will ripple down the management chain or there'll be a desk visit to pass on the information as well.
:)
At home it's the never ending spam that's worn me down. My ISP runs spam filters and I run local spam filtering prior to downloading any actual messages and, whilst the level of spam became reasonable for a while, it's getting worse all the time and I get really bored deleting all the crap - even though most spam is automatically marked for me by software.
At work 70% of the email is useless noise which has been forwarded down the entire management chain with a message to "cascade to all staff". Sadly these message are usually along the lines of "Fred Bloggs has just been appointed as deputy leader to Mike Hunt and will now be reporting to Freda Smiggles" and whilst this is obviously a source of pride for Mr Bloggs, and undoubtedly useful for anyone who has dealings with Mr. Hunt and Ms. Smiggles, it has absolutely nothing to do with me or the team I work for. And in case you're wondering the other 30% consists of:
10% poor quality or old jokes, "unfunny" images and simply awful powerpoint slide shows.
9.9% good jokes or "funny" images.
0.1% funny powerpoint slideshows.
4% false rumours,
4% true rumours and
2% useful information.
Luckily though most of the mangement stuff get's processed by my mail filters so that it's automatically "marked as read" and moved into a spam folder (which is named "Management Information"
I've found that the more prevalent the use of email technology, the poorer the "signal to noise" ratio has become. I therefore long ago took the decision to give email less status than normal mail. So I have a quick scan first thing in the morning, seperate out the stuff that looks interesting and then either bin or ignore the rest.
If I'm sent something that requires a reply then I'll usually get round to it but very rarely with much regard to timing. I also always refuse to allow anything like "receipt reports" or "the email has been opened reports" and if I ever lose the ability to do this I'll just not run my mail client more than once a week.
So if you're expecting a reply to an email you've sent me then don't hold your breath. I'll do it when I get round to it. But by the same token when I send emails I don't expect a reply in any great hurry so at least I'm consistent
Personally I think the whole idea of a letter, whether transported via a physical medium or the aether, is to facilitate offline communication. You send it when you feel like it and I reply when I feel like it. That's a civilised way to communicate.
Devices and methods which facilitate urgent communication should be used sparingly and should be restricted to life changing/threatening events such as a loved one being taken ill or imminent disaster. Personally my job involves me concentrating on the matter in hand and I do not appreciate being continually interrupted with trivial crap.
Just my tuppence worth.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
I just sent a mail professing my love to a girl i know and the suspense is fucking killin me.
How about NEVER? Does that work for you?
I have 8 people that work in my Unit. When I send out an email to the group needing an immediate response, I know that only 2 will respond right away (assuming they are at their desk).
I've had a request to "send" "data" to someone, with a deadline of thursday for a few weeks now. It began, "OK, fine, no worries just tell me what data you need and in what format." No response. The owner of this project starts sending me colour-coded emails. "Urgent send data" I reply to him, "Give me an idea which items you need and in what form to send it." I get back "put it in an excel spread sheed, I don't know, here talk to this person xxxxxx@xxxxx.org" I email their contact and a week goes by. I get another urgent email. I reply I still don't have any spec or specifics and get another email. I send out a query to that one. Days pass and nothing. Finally I'm getting orange (which I presume is more urgent than red) and another plea to "send data soon, deadline approaching." I reply, to the entire list of those cc'd with the plea. "these people need to contact me, I need specifics, I don't just send "data" any old way." Finally someone kicks the people at xxxxx.org in the pants and they phone. Bam! It's taken care of in mere minutes. Got exactly what they needed.
So why did it take so long?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I delayed this first post to make myself look busy.
sw5YRhw4ln3pr7$Ock1/4ma0u8Lw2Tm5l6/7DOiC5e6t4NSb6
I'm starting to find that more large entities (St. Louis University, etc.) are starting to filter mail more aggressively. This by itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but many of them are doing it poorly, by silently dropping e-mails that they filter. It's really frustrating when many of your e-mails get through, but one doesn't, and you never know about it. Did they receive it? Did they just miss it? And if they're filtering on content, you can't just reply to your first e-mail and ask "Did you have a chance to look at this?" because that one will get dropped too.
Consequently, e-mail becomes unreliable (at least to people at that organization), so you phone or IM them instead.
I have found the reason a lot of people use email over phone, IM, or in-person meetings is that when email is sent, they have a (semi-)permanent record of that message, and it provokes a response back in the same manner, resulting in the same record. This "paper trail" then allows someone to go back and claim they discussed topics, brought up facts, alerted the appropriate people, and generally did everything they were supposed to do, and if a response did not happen... it's not their fault.
This is a double-edged sword. I work Help Desk - often, I request that a user send request by email so that A) we get all the details in writing, such as screen shots or error text, and B) they have a record that they sent the request. B is important because it prevents someone from saying "I reported this a week ago, why isn't it fixed?", but it also means that when they DO send it, I need to respond and follow up in a reasonable time frame, because it then becomes a part of Help Desk Metrics.
Some users despise email, because it consumes all their productivity handling it. Others live and die by it, unwilling to throw out even one-liners from 4 years ago for fear that a manager will ask them to review it at some point in the future. It is the latter that ratchet up the stress associated with email, because if you don't treat the system with the same importance they do, it throws their own system off-kilter (They no longer can rely on a timely response they can refer to in the future if needed), and it may be perceived as a lack of respect for them personally. It also means you need to carefully word and consider every email you send, because someone else will keep it for reference for possibly years from now.
Admittedly, if you write to unix geeken who still use pine, elm, etc. then it won't work(it uses html tags inside the messages) but it's a fairly accurate indicator of when someone has read your messages.
If anyone knows of a freeware project like MsgTag, I'd love to hear about it.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Many times I just don't answer at all. Especially if I got trown into a CC battle of top, bottom and HTML posters. Most of the time it is from people who are either 20 metres away max.
...
Many emails are also a waste of time because it is notthe apropriate way to communicate. People use it to chat and expect an answer. If you want to chat or discuss, walk by or phone me if the distance is a problem.
Timewise it will go much faster to have an interactive conversation. e.g.
What are the numers for today?
- 75 and 120 while we expected 80 and 90.
What is that and can we still correct them
- The reason is that the warehouse hase been flooded and we are now working on getting it dry
Will
I have seen email-threads go on like this over periods of days and weeks. A 15 minute meeting was all it took to get things straight between the three involved departments.
So you need to pick your way of communicating and should not think that email is the only answer. It almost never is.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Yeah, my girlfriend. When I send her an email, I never know if she received it or not. That's because I send her email after email after email and she never answers them. I think her filtering software just puts the stuff right in the trash. But why doesn't she ever look in the trash to see if there's a message from me? Come to think of it, she never answers the phone when I call either. Maybe because she dumped me four years ago? Nah, couldn't be.
I work in IT Support and if I get an email from someone from someone in the company and its trouble to status update, I will answer ASAP. If its an email from an outside vendor or party, I usually wait to respond to them until I know I have free time. That is how I prioritize.
A coworker recently sent me an email about some inane, unimportant thing. Fifteen minutes later, he forwarded the same email he'd just sent. Five minutes after that, he stomped down to my office, and called me an arrogant asshole for not responding to his email in what he thought was a timely manner. WTF?
hey dave, how does the new blog front-end look? dave...?
please dont mod this up. i could get fired.
...here.
"Resist the pace of urgency"
These are the wise words from the Director of my department. She has a lot of experience dealing with kids with Attention Deficit Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder, who believe it or not, resemble many geeks. For those of us who provide technical support this doesn't mean ignore or stall. It means prioritize and set reasonable boundaries for yourself. Some people seem to think better after they've articulated their problem in an email. Half the time, given some perculation time- they can actually solve their own problem. So stay focused, do your work, and deal with emails as you see fit. If you are one of those who may have high functioning ASD tendancies, don't worry, you are in good company.
I have a rule of not responding to any email until the same request is made 3 times. If it's really important, they won't stop after just 1 or 2 attempts.
You like email politics? Uh, so tell me...do you really enjoy your JOB anymore? Have you lost your soul?
Others, I will prioritize according to business impact, and the person's attitude. The assholes get bumped to the back of the queue, those who respect my time and don't hassle the shit out of me generally get a much better turn-around time.
Such is life - make mine hell and you'll get it back 5 fold :D
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
My problem is that when I see the people that send those emails, they know how much of an idiotic retard I think they are, even if I don't say a word.
xobni.com has a cool (free) product that will tell you the average response time for people you e-mail - so you know exactly when it's best to e-mail people for quickest response. pretty helpful.
... why some people just refuse to use email at all. Or they answer every email *with a phone call*.
:)
;)
:)
I do freelance web development and other stuff (like Access front-ends) in my "spare time". Memo to clients - I *need* you to put your thoughts into words; words that actually fit together and make sense, so that I can work with them. No, I don't want to take your rambling half-hour call about how you got some sort of vague error, I want screenshots, and numbered steps on how you produced it. As I patiently explained to you the last fifteen times
Actually, I wouldn't mind a call so much if they actually organized their thoughts and communicated them effectively. But to do that, they'd have to first write them down - and if they're going to write them down, why not just send them to me?
I mean, I'd just hate to have a nice record of what we talked about to refer back to, copies of relevant text, images of relevant popups, etc. And I'd hate to communicate asynchronously when we're working asynchronously
So yes, the psychology of email (or in this case, non-email) interests me
[Captian Obvious disclaimer: Yes, I know I can bill them for the phone time. Yes, I could sit on the phone with them, patiently coax it out of them, and type it all up for them. But I have too much work and too many competing priorities as it is! And most of them *don't* actually want to pay for project planning and management time; they just want to call "quickly" and "chat" about things]
System-wide application level event notification framework.. Growl Homepage Just a tip!
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
I just won't respond to this at all
Great advice on getting your inbox near zero and keeping it there:
http://www.43folders.com/2006/03/13/inbox-zero/
Bill Lumbergh: Hello Peter. What's happening? Ahhh, we have a sort of a problem here. Yeah, you apparently didn't put one of the new cover sheets on your T.P.S. report.
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Dom Portwood: Hello, Peter. What's happening? We need to talk about your TPS reports.
Peter Gibbons: Yeah. The coversheet. I know, I know. Uh, Bill talked to me about it.
Dom Portwood: Yeah. Uh, did you get that memo?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah. I got the memo. And I understand the policy. The problem is, I just forgot this one time. And I've already taken care of it so it's not even a problem anymore.
Dom Portwood: Yeah. It's just that we're putting new coversheets on all the TPS reports *before* they go out now. So if you could just remember to do that from now on, that'd be great. Alright!
Personally, I've found over-use of read-reciepts to be a problem, but have found there to be times when they are necessary to. Main times I use them are on people who, in the past, I've sent an email to, a day or more goes by without a response, I call them, and they say "I never got your email." A number of these people use this as a constant work avoidance device, always claiming to not recieve the email, after multiple resends. A read reciept at least proves they did receive it, and thus it was not a glitch on the mail-server, etc.
--- It's not my fault this post looks redundant. I just type too slow.
If you had that record, then you would be able to point to it when they come to you and say "This isn't what I wanted!" - you could point to that record and say "This is what you told me to do, and furthermore what I gave you works exactly as you asked for!". Of course, the more extreme and insane clients would still look you straight in the eye and deny it - even if it had their signature and signoff on it. Believe me, this is the reason.
CYA through deniability...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
You must love flame wars. Being able to wave what somebody wrote under their noses doesn't accomplish anything, except that you get to trade accusations of "reading out of context" and "you're missing the point."
Trading email over a contentious issue always degenerates into childish crap, in my experience. Whenever I have an interchange like that, I immediately try to talk in person or on the phone. Conversations that would be flame wars online usually can be turned into something like consensus in simple, plain talking.
This requires some patience, of course, I recently had a difference of opinion with one guy who didn't seem to understand my priorities. Once our emails got out of hand, I gave him a phone call. Talking to him required a lot of patience — he's one of those people who has to think 5 seconds before each sentence, and gets upset if you interrupt him — but we did eventually come to a meeting of the minds, something we never would have done if we'd kept the convesation online.
Now, you do sometimes need to put a conversation on the record. But holding the conversation online is not a good way to do that. You end up with long, complicated emails where nobody agrees as to what exactly people said. Instead, you wait until the conversation is over, then you send all interested parties a concise summary of your understanding of who agreed to what, and who told who to do what. If nobody contradicts you, then they've tactitly bought into your understanding of the conversation, and are not in a position to disavow what they said. And if somebody does contradict you, so much the better, because it means that you misunderstood something that was said.