When someone sends you an email, when should they expect a reply? Within an hour? A day? It is a simple question, but the answer (and you can send them to me via email if you’d like) isn’t.
I think most of us try to respond within a business day, and if we get the email early enough, by the close of that day too. It is a pretty good rule of thumb.
But then some of us expect a response even quicker, and get annoyed or impatient of the delay. To me, this represents something out of balance, like some scenes from the movie Koyaanisqatsi. (Little ironies department: I now live about a mile from the former site of Pruitt-Igoe made famous in the movie.)
I was talking to a colleague yesterday about how she often replies to her emails late at night, after her husband has gone to sleep. It made me think about how often I reply to emails in the early morning, before my own wife awakes.
And how many of us can’t leave the laptop home when we go on vacation for fear of the massive email pile-up that will await us upon our return? Or who can’t help ourselves but “multitask” during meetings and clear our inboxes when we are supposed to be part of the meeting itself?
There are some that are hyperactive email responders, carrying BlackBerries and being reachable 24×7. You know who you are.
Is this healthy? I am beginning to wonder.
The irony is that I have come full circle on email responsiveness. Back in the early days of my own email use, I tried to respond to every email that I received within a few hours. This is the early 1980s, when the Internet was still a DoD science project, and few people had the ability to send messages between corporations, let alone across the world. It was still a novelty then.
In the early 1990s, I had an Internet-reachable email address, actually several. When I started Network Computing magazine, we were one of the first magazines to include email addresses of the authors for each article, which was also novel concept then. Now you can find them for the bylines in my local paper. I was also an early user of the BlackBerry precursor, called Radiomail. I remember one time pulling over at one toll plaza on the Garden State Parkway to answer some emails. A curious cop came over and was wondering what I was doing.
Back when Computer Associates (now called just CA) first implemented their email network, they actually turned the system off for several hours during the workday because they wanted their staff to get work done. This was before various executives were caught cooking the books, so I guess it worked too well. They eventually stopped doing this, and now email is available 24×7, just like everywhere else.
The email landscape sure has changed since then and what was novel is now de rigueur. Today most of us think nothing about emailing people that are halfway around the world, and of course now I get spam in about a dozen different languages, if I could figure out the character sets that come into my inbox.
The trick to being successful with email can be summed up with one word: balance. Or getting back into email balance.
“I do however still get a chuckle by those who complain they can’t get work done at the office, yet are sending personal emails out all day long,” says Rich DiGirolamo, who writes a very amusing email newsletter and is a professional keynote speaker. “Some of us make every effort to answer every email within twenty-four hours, but at times we need to prioritize them. Yours just may not be as important to me as you think it is. But it will get answered, I promise.”
I think that is a great strategy. I recommend setting aside some time every day to read your emails, and perhaps a separate time to write replies. But don’t let it bleed into the entire day.
Maybe we need an email rehab center in Malibu to help those that need to get their lives back into balance.
I thought I got a lot of mail, until I read this post from Dylan Tweney who now works at Wired News. Some best practice info herein.
http://dylan.tweney.com/2007/03/20/2714-unread-messages/
GREAT column! I completely agree. The behavior the irritates me the most is the B’berry user that will stop any conversation to see what just arrived each time their device vibrates. The not-to-subtle
messages is, ‘WhatEVER I’m being emailed about must be more important than whatever I’m discussing with you!”.
-Doug
I heard of a guy who wrote a script he invokes when his mailbox gets too far behind.
It returns each email to the sender with an apologetic note along the lines of “I am so buried, I am burning my inbox and deleting everything in it. My apologies. If this was important, would you please re-send it?”
I am trying to decide if I dare to do this.
— David C.
* Email to me is my filing cabinet, my old-school in/out box, calendar and to-do list etc.
* Corporate email just flat out sucks/makes people less productive, I chose to be a contractor for my profession partly because of corporate
restrictions such as having to deal with mega-amounts of useless “TPS report” emails, nothing gets done. I am 500% more
effective/productive working as a separate entity, focus is on doing/results, not on keeping everyone and the janitor in the loop.
* I use email as a tool to pitch stories to a variety of media. Did 95% of my pitches go to spam-land? Was the content of my pitch poor
and got deleted? Did it get filed for later, because media just like to have the rainy day story on ‘file’? My daily email usage is likely
not the best representation of the average user. I use the phone to call media after emails go out, human interaction is the only way to
find out if a story is worthwhile or not, that’s just the nature of my business.
* I respond to urgent emails real-time, non urgent ones at least same day, however, I don’t get 100 emails a day, so I can make that time-frame. Corporate folks may get 200 a day and that’s just not productive…count me out of that scenario.
* I had a blackberry as an insurance policy if a member of the media was on deadline, needed something and yet only emailed me. If i
missed a story because of a missed email, hari-cari would ensue, but, that scenario only happened 2 times last year, so the blackberry got
retired, the phone aspects of it were poor.
— Jamie Diamond
Diamond Public Relations
Are our collective e-mail woes more of a self-inflicted malady than a problem of balance. E-Mail was never intended as a real-time means of communicating with someone. It’s beauty was the cost factor along with never reaching a full voice mailbox. The advent of the Blackberry has pushed e-mail into a new and troubling realm.
Blackberries are now the means for doing work during pointless meetings rather than insisting on focused, purposeful meetings. There is a reason Meg Whitman, among other top execs, have banned all blackberries from all her meetings. Employees need to insist on meetings being useful and productive. No CYA meetings allowed.
IM is another great diversion in the workplace. Useful when used properly but too often, it’s a gossip channel. No real means for message tracking makes IM an “electronic water cooler”.
Please allow me to start the discussion with a proposed communication tools re-balancing plan.
Voice calls: If you need an answer within 6 hours, call me, Leave me a voice mail if I cannot be reached. I will clear voice mails at regular intervals during the work day and will change the outgoing message when I am out of the office for the day; 1 day or many days.
IM: Gossip channel during boring conf calls when the mute button is engaged. If you want to know if you can call me, invest in MS-LCS and use the presence info.
E-mail: Messages not needing action on my part within 6 hours or messages that need to carry attachments. If you, the sender, believe I need to respond within 6 hours, flag the message with high importance. I will allow my personal rule engine to forward to my cell-phone an indication that your important message has arrived. Only those individuals being asked to take action should be on the “To:” line. Everyone appears on the “cc:” or “bcc:” lines. Again, filters can be applied to messages and prioritization is much easier with some simple rules.
Everyone ought to have at least 1 Yahoo, G-Mail or Hotmail account so that personal messages can be separated from business messaging. These free services are becoming very feature rich to the point they rival many corporate systems. Rule engines allow these systems to send alerts of arriving priority messages so even personal messages can receive appropriate attention.
The bottom line is that companies need to establish a messaging culture starting at the top. If the CEO follows specific rules, the rules will trickle down. If the CEO believes that their 24 x 7 company-focused lives ought to be the same for all direct reports, all is lost.
Perhaps the real question to ask is “Is the Blackberry so popular because it is easier to play CYA than copying voice mails to others inside and outside the company?” From a legal standpoint, voice mail is less likely to be retained than an e-mail.
— Mark Ryan
You are forgetting that IM is now replacing the need for those urgent, gotta-have-a-response situations. At least, some of us. Unfortunately there are still a lot of folks out that that view IM as something done for social purposes that their kids do.
— Patricia F.
I have 2 comments on this topic:
1. I recommend the email strategies in the new book Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst of goodexperience.com.
2. My email addiction is not too bad, however I have complete computer burnout! After an hour or so I start to feel antsy and want to get away from the beast and do something else. This is bad because nearly everything I do – work and personally – involves the computer.
I started using computers daily on the job in about 1975. I’ve had a computer in my house since about 1977. I am not a programmer, but a computer user and the first thing that really got me excited about computers in my home was Deluxe Paint on the Amiga. And now here I am, burned right out! I wonder if there are others like me. There is something very unnatural about using computers I think … something that should be studied.
Micky