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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.'"
"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."
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...
Which is fine. It means he is concentrating on the task at hand and not being easily distracted.
If you need an immediate answer, why the hell are you resorting to email? There is no reliable way to even be sure that he received your message, let alone that he is going to read it right away or take the time to addesss it.
If you need an answer for something, never rely on email. It is great for "please review the attached doc and get back to me by Friday" (if followed up with a phone call before Friday) or "FYI" stuff. But it isn't a substitute for a phone call (which may still be shunted to voice mail), or a physical visit if the person is close enough.
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
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...
If you send someone an email, you want to be able to hold them to what they say in the reply.
If you talk in person instead of email, you don't want anybody to be able to hold you to what you say.
It's all about repudiation.
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