All my emails are on a one hour tape delay, to account for global lunch breaks in time zones around the world.
Somewhere in time and space, people are trying eat lunch right now.
Even SMS gets a tape delay for the first response. What if my phone was on vibrate in my coat pocket, hanging in the closet? After that first response, you'll know I have it in hand, so I'll make with the snappy replies, since I trusted you with my phone number to begin with.
Chats? The window was minimized. What do you want from me? Blood?
Emails may or may not enjoy 24 hour response times. I don't check all of my email addresses on a daily basis. Work emails are starkly divided from personal emails, for legal reasons regarding domain names (DNS) and bare metal server locations and territorial jurisdiction. Some animals are more equal than others.
I work in email security. If we even delay some emails for 5 minutes+ we're going to see significant customer response. Systems are designed accordingly.
> when they're starting their workday they'll see it
Well… I often don’t check my email till after lunch or later. This has never been a problem since anybody who needs an answer to something in less than 24 hours uses slack or text messaging.
I'm starting to implement a rough buffer of 48 hours on all my email replies. Unless you are a) a personal friend b) this is your first email to me or c) it needs addressing within 48 hrs.
It seems to be working so far - my productivity has gone up and the pace of email correspondence has slowed (so a 10 email conversation takes a couple of weeks now rather than a few hours).
Several people have commented that they enjoy talking with me for this reason; they don't feel pressured to reply "right now" and enjoy getting a response after some undetermined delay.
I sometimes wonder if the march of technology has had some downsides in terms of "right here right now" thinking.
I think what many people fail to realize, in a corporate setting, is that email is asynchronous communication. Email is not chat, and we need to approach it differently. When I send an email, I expect an answer when you get time--if it's something I need within 24-48 hours, I will call, visit, or IM you if you're online.
> frankly if the message can't handle at least a few hours delay then email probably isn't the right medium for it.
This may have been the case in the mid-90s, but it is certainly not the case today. I frequently receive emails that require immediate attention, whether from my employer, my bank, or any number of other notifications. Normal email users expect emails to be delivered in seconds, not hours.
I make heavy use of email scheduling (and more recently Slack message scheduling) and will often schedule messages to go out in a few hours or the next day. That way, I can get my thoughts down in the moment, but not get sucked into a back-and-forth when I don't have time for it. I work with students and have found that delaying my responses tends set their expectation that they're not going to get a quick answer and train them over time to spend a bit more time trying to find an answer themselves because they can't depend on me for an immediate response.
I love email. Why? Because I'm a programmer and I don't want to be interrupted. I like to keep the day-to-day things simple because my work is anything but simple.
I use gmail and everyone I know has my gmail address. It has excellent spam filters and it's easy to manage. Best of all, it never bothers me. When I'm ready for a break, I check and manage my email. It takes 5 minutes, just enough time to eat an apple.
Family, close friends, and some business associates have my cell phone #. They know not to text me because if I'm working, I will not respond. If I'm not working, the only response they'll get is "ok". If the phone rings, I know it must be important to talk. Usually not for long, then back to work.
I do not IM. I do not Twitter. I can't imagine worse ways to ruin productivity. I IM'd for 3 days. I got nothing done, so I emailed everyone to never IM me again. Email me and I'll respond when I'm available.
I surf my favorite sites (especially hn) during breaks. When the break is over, on go the headphones and up comes my text editor. See you in an hour or two. Not before then.
You're not entitled to other peoples' time. Email lets your interrupt people 24/7, if you don't take that responsibility seriously expect to be ignored sometimes. Your priorities are not their priorities.
Your emails were probably in a queue, handled by people who work on them full time. It's completely different than someone choosing to answer your email later.
I do the same. Of course, it depends on the situation. When someone is blocked, or when it's a fellow dev, I respond fast. But responding immediately often teaches people (especially non-technical ones) that you have time and focus to always reply this fast. Value your own time, and manage others' expectations. Scheduling that e-mail for 15 minutes later will save you lots of time and frustration in the long run.
Most people I've ever worked with treat email as an immediate conversation. If you don't respond within 20 minutes (and typically within 5) they'll send another, try me over chat, or even call and immediately go "did you see my email?"
I sometimes takes days to respond, unless something is truly urgent – which of course it almost never is. For whatever reason this pisses some people off, but they also learn that the best way to get an immediate answer out of me is to call (I work 100% remote.)
I do some time sensitive work with clients. It's time sensitive because there are often hard deadlines or deadlines that are created and set 25-48 hours out. Clients are often in different time zones.
This is the first time in my career where I have had push notifications for work email on my phone. I don't love it. Mostly because while many of the emails are not time sensitive once I got in the habit of answering things when they come in instead of batching emails (what i've previously done) then every email seems more important and its easier to answer than to know I've got a non urgent email I need to answer at some point in the next 24-48 hours.
I write all of this to say... Not everyone can turn off work email after 5pm.
>> This implicitly assigns recipients a time limit, because responding too late would be considered rude. If you're receiving 500+ emails a day that expect a prompt response, you don't stand a chance.
This issue is addressed with a standard "Out of Office" response.
The difference here is that Dave is making everyone who emailed him wait until some future date to re-send any non-urgent message.
It significantly reduces the workload for Dave but increases the workload for others.
I'd be curious to hear the reaction of people who emailed him and had to wait to re-send their message.
> I’ve noticed that if I respond to people’s emails quickly, they send me more emails.
That's funny: when I learnt this, I have encouraged myself to reply with a delay so that give people a chance to resolve problems on their own and generate less emails for future me to handle.
If email is interrupting you 24/7 then you're treating it as a synchronous medium instead of an asynchronous one. I get a LOT of requests that I respond to with "can you email that to me?" because I'm often away from my desk and working on something else. Sometimes I'll look at subject lines in the notification area on my phone, but the only messages that get looked at immediately even during the work day are ones from a small number of people and notifications of antivirus events from our monitoring system.
I've made it a habit to wait for 24 hours to respond to an incendiary email. Allows both parties to calm a bit and the response is more balanced and eloquent.
Somewhere in time and space, people are trying eat lunch right now.
Even SMS gets a tape delay for the first response. What if my phone was on vibrate in my coat pocket, hanging in the closet? After that first response, you'll know I have it in hand, so I'll make with the snappy replies, since I trusted you with my phone number to begin with.
Chats? The window was minimized. What do you want from me? Blood?
Emails may or may not enjoy 24 hour response times. I don't check all of my email addresses on a daily basis. Work emails are starkly divided from personal emails, for legal reasons regarding domain names (DNS) and bare metal server locations and territorial jurisdiction. Some animals are more equal than others.
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