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.'"

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[hellfire]

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.

Email all day

[floppy ears]

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.

Black Hole

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

24 hours

[Wylfing]

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.

Re:I've cut back

[SanityInAnarchy]

I generally check my email at least once a day, probably several times. I can use the distraction.

It's extremely odd. As a programmer, distractions make me more productive, so long as they aren't actually interruptions. In Deep Hack Mode (TM), I won't be interrupted at all, so I simply won't check my mail. But most of the time, going to lunch, going for a walk, putting my feet up on my desk, or reading Slashdot will make me more productive, because it makes me think about something else.

Counterintuitive, but it works, because when I come back to what I was stuck on, I see it in a new way. It's almost as if the less I work, the better I work.

Of course, a significant amount of my time is spent doing more of a grind -- fix this bug, tweak this margin, look up that CSS property, go back to a co-worker and explain a fix I need. I can do that for days at a time. But when I'm actually doing what I'm good at, the programming work itself, that's when breaks make me productive.

However, even if this were not the case, I doubt I'd put it off for more than a few days. Unless I'm really that busy, I see no reason to. If it can reasonably be done over email, it makes sense that way, and when it can't, I pick up the phone or I walk into someone's office. I don't often see flamewars, and I don't try to formulate the perfect email -- I type in a normal conversational style.

I guess I separate interactivity from urgentness. For instance, if a server goes down and I'm needed to put out fires, a simple email, IM, SMS, phone call, or absolutely any way of getting the message "COME TO WORK" to me is fine. Another example: Discussing requirements with a client must always be done in person, but isn't necessarily urgent -- that meeting could be set up five days from now.

But that's just what's worked for me. I can understand people crafting the perfect email, or avoiding email for various reasons -- it doesn't have to make sense to me. It's probably the same sort of psychology which causes people to have rules about never taking work home, and having a place of work and a place of play that are distinct and separate -- the same psychology which suggests that you shouldn't do anything in bed other than sleep or sex.