I don't know where the author is from but this goes dead against common courtesy in the UK for sure, and probably similar places like Canada and Japan as well. In Japan you might expect the apology to be longer than the email content.
In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours. If I get blown off, or if somebody takes 4 days to respond to my email, my impression is always that my counterparty views the matter as unimportant. For my part, if I reply late, and if the matter is genuinely important, I think it's proper and fitting to include a brief note of apology.
In email communications with friends, it varies. I'll often let conversations hang for a while until there's something new to discuss.
Different people and different work environments have different rules.'
I view my email once per week. If you need an immediate answer from me, I expect you to send me a slack/chat/pagerduty warning, even one that says "I sent you an email, I need answer by tomorrow".
24 hours -> 1 business day
don't expect replies over weekends and holidays
Absolutely! The author doesn't mention what type of communication he means, but for business communications, anything over 24 hours must have some explanation.
It's always better to explain yourself; otherwise, it looks unprofessional if you reply after a week as though it's normal.
Overall, recommendations about email look very personal and shouldn't be taken as general advice.
> In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours.
Sounds funny because I only read mails when someone tell me about them on MSTeams.
Between IM, supports tickets and jira stories I don't really see the point of emails anymore. If it is something that has an SLA tickets seem to be the way to go, if not Teams. If it is an urgent matter, mentioning my name or calling me will be a quicker way to go. Email seem to be in that weird place where some people still seem to want to insert invisible business matters in an ocean of junk and automatized mails/notifications you generally never subscribe yourself but ends up subscribed by default when given access to resources/applications.
(1) I don't have Jira, (2) I don't want to fill out a SLA ticket, (3) I don't use Teams, (4) I don't know your phone number and/or prefer to deal with things in writing.
Email works because: (a) it is ubiquitous, (b) you don't have to pay for some proprietary software to use it, (c) you remain in control of your data (no IM messages suddenly disappearing), (d) you have a permanent, local, copy of what was said in writing, (e) it's often the standard court-recognised form of communication, other than post, for things that matter legally (e.g. sending notices).
That's not to say that email isn't without many defects. But it's still the best we have for many work-related use cases.
Teams may work for your internal messages but if you deal with anyone outside of your own employer email is still the standard for communication. Not every piece of business that gets done fits into a ticket system.
Just because one doesn’t see the point doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.
Each communication tool has its strengths, namely managing interruptions.
People using one’s attention as their inbox directly with DM vs a when you can get to it email can be easily mismanaged.
It’s different for each job.
It can be common courtesy as long as the other party is not feeling entitled to one's time and attention.
i would suspect this flies over the OPs head.
“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”
-Donald Knuth
In that case, emails like IM's can be batched together during a 30 minute block twice a day.
> Apologizing for taking time to reply to my email is awkward and makes me uncomfortable.
> It also puts a lot of pressure on me: what if I take more time than you to reply? Isn’t the whole point of asynchronous communication to be… asynchronous? Each on its own rhythm?
This one of those sentiments that makes me scratch my head. If this little thing makes you uncomfortable to the point that you need to write a blog post about it, how do you survive?
Some of us survive because we have anxiety deeply rooted in a fear of failure. It causes us to be perfectionists. This can look like success for those who hide it well.
I have been hospitalized and almost died multiple times from stress-related disorders, so I get it. But as soon as I catch myself putting aspects on the behaviour of other people -- especially for something this small -- it's time for me to looking inwards.
> If this little thing makes you uncomfortable to the point that you need to write a blog post about it, how do you survive?
Not the author, but I'd wager it's an evolving story over many years. At first, you ignore it entirely. It might not even register at first, or if it does, it's just a barely conscious "huh, this interaction makes me feel weird" sort of deal. And you leave it be. But then death by a thousand cuts later, you're irritated by this habit and want to speak out against it. And so, you write a blog post about why it's bad or annoying or whatever. And then you go back to surviving another day.
For me the point is that if you feel uncomfortable over something that is widespread and considered normal social etiquette, it's on you to deal with feeling uncomfortable, and you can't really expect everyone else to change their behaviour just for you.
> For me the point is that if you feel uncomfortable over something that is widespread and considered normal social etiquette, it's on you to deal with feeling uncomfortable, and you can't really expect everyone else to change their behaviour just for you.
Ah, the classic "fuck the neurodivergent" stance.
What an unpleasant attitude. People have emotions. If they're apologizing, maybe they feel bad. Accept it and get on with your day. A punctilious email etiquette isn't going to improve anything.
I actually really liked the post. I'm often prone to apologizing, thinking that it's a social expectation, and the post made me smile and relax a bit, thinking to myself "oh, maybe it's not that important, and it'll be ok if I don't".
Responding too quickly to emails is the same as responding too quickly to IMs, it will often invite more responding.
That depends on context, and how you phrase the reply.
Such a weird thing to say, if this makes you uncomfortable, imagine how uncomfortable it makes the other side reading this.
It is common courtesy, not a big deal.
Common courtesies often have a ratchet effect, only increasing in expectations over time, and we need a correction every once in a while to avoid sinking into the expectation abyss.
I feel like the lag-time of communication was an important component of older forms of communication that has been lost. That's not to say that fast communication isn't a boon to society, of course. Only that slower communication gives you more flexibility in how you respond, and more time to think about what your response should be.
When the main form of long distance communication was the postal system, and letters took days to travel from sender to receiver, you could easily wait days, if not weeks, to draft up your reply and mail it out. The recipient on the other end wouldn't even be able to discern the difference between your delay and the delay from the postal network itself. It had some in-built slack.
When the only phones were landlines, if someone called you and you knew you were in a bad mood, the kind of bad mood that would invariably make you say something stupid, you could just not pick up! There were plenty of common, understandable reasons someone wouldn't be available to answer their landline. Then they could leave you a message, and you could call back when you mood improved again. Again, there was slack built into the system.
Now there's this cultural expectation that puts far more attention on your reaction speed. A text message with no immediate response could just be them not seeing it immediately... But actually no! Now we have read receipts too! You can't even pretend to have not seen it yet while you think of your reply. Some platforms even have the little "currently typing" indicator tell them how long you've spent drafting and re-drafting whatever message you ended up sending. A panopticon of communication. Now there's no slack. Any person anywhere in the world could try and get a hold of you with the same expectation of immediacy that a face-to-face conversation would supply.
Now of course, not every single person I might text, call, or send an email to, will have the same expectations for what is an appropriate degree of responsiveness. But, (speaking from my personal experience) I am absolutely miserable at reading that from social clues. I am left having to assume that, in the absence of some clear indicator to the contrary, whoever I am writing to will actually have rather strict expectations, and that allowing myself to be lax may very well give them a terrible opinion of me. (Though, the degree to which their opinion of me actually matters is a different question entirely!)
I'll continue apologizing. I'm very sorry, though.
A buried appeal to avoid top posting.
Good, but like all good things, top posting is why we can't have good things.
It isn't going to stop.
Bottom posting confuses the hell out of most people. I gave it a try but people kept complaining so I'm back to top posting even though it makes absolutely no sense.
I bottom-post if the other person do so first. That almost never happens these days. I guess if too many do it like that then no one will be the first to bottom-post, even when both would prefer that. Not sure what a good solution would be that did not involve confusing random other people with bottom-posts.
I remember around the time top-posting had taken over, someone on a mailing list being upset about having their mail cut up and quoted inline by someone else. Can imagine today many might react like that if they ever encounter nicely formatted mail replies.
I think our contexts are all different. But, to share a different experience, as an academic (with plenty of conversations involving people in industry as well each year) I have used interleaved and bottom-posting for decades and it causes confusion maybe once a year at most and mostly because Microsoft's online client is broken and at times does not even render anything below "Dear Foo," in the HTML view (got to give this small start up in Redmond some more time though, we can not expect them to implement standards that have only been around for over 40 years).
Same. I tried really hard to quote properly, because I was so annoyed by the top-posting mess that everyone else did, and it frustrated me that people would add you to an email where you need to read 100 things that came before it (with increasingly garbled formatting) to understand what was going on.
I felt people were unwilling to take the responsibility for communicating properly, and so they took the easy route where they could shrug their shoulders and say "I included all the context."
I only ever got complaints from people who were confused by the quoting style or didn't know what the email was about. I'm not sure if it's still true, but at the time, Outlook didn't use threaded view mode by default and most people didn't know about it. FWIW I work in manufacturing and not in tech, I expect the level of competence in tech is a little higher, though I also hear how people moan about having to learn the tools they use every day, so maybe there's little difference.
True. Once a coworker asked me why I was responding with an empty mail since my reply was at the bottom, and he didn't bother to scroll down. Since then, I gave up and just started using conventions everyone else is using. The goal is not purity, but clarity of communications.
I even started to avoid inline responses and comments, many find even that confusing.
Wonder if there's a way to make the popular email clients (outlook/gmail) re-sort conversation view so that the newest reply is at the bottom.
then enforce it by policy across the org, and watch the chaos as people read before speaking.
E-mail was always asynchronous communication tool.
For people who like to see waving three dots in iPhone chat, e-mailing makes them anxious. So I understand that apology is quite normal.
It is a sort of generational difference, imho.
Chats are ambiguous because it functions both as sync and async. I treat my whatsapp messages as async, but time and again I get heat from people because I take too long to reply, something I'll never feel the urge to apologize for.
I see this in the opposite direction at work. I'll send someone a chat message after their working hours and they'll actually reply apologizing that can't look now and will reply tomorrow. Or that they're just waking up and they'll look later today. Yeah, that's what I expect, I'm not your boss asking you to come in on a Saturday. Why on earth are you looking at your work chat outside of your work hours anyway??
They could be giving you a subtle hint to not send messages outside of work hours.
I don't know their working hours, we've got staff all over the globe and people work whatever hours they like. I have no expectation for anyone to check work communications outside of their working hours, and it's bonkers to me that people think anyone would have that expectation.
written letters are asynchronous but people expected timely (relative to snail mail) replies even back then.
I am pretty sure this is not true.
I recall my mother’s family conversing via mail in the early 80’s - and she would write one 10 page letter a month as a reply (max) - that would 3 or 4 mails a year with any particular sibling (and probably 1 phone call - but phone calls to alaska were expensive, and you wouldn’t say all you wanted to).
> generational difference
I feel squeezed in the middle between antsy-verbose zoomer emailers and terse boomer emailers that hit me with ambiguous 5 word replies or those godforsaken emojii email reacts.
My decree is that 95% of emails should be three sentences double-spaced. 5% should be paragraphs. Hypertext is permissible almost entirely because of quote formatting, which should be used liberally so that each email is as self-contained as possible.
You do not need hypertext to prefix lines with "> ".
Reminding you of context is just weird, just scroll down an read you previous email
Reminding of context can be useful to summarize your understanding and what you are responding to.
Kind of like LLMs.
I do feel there's far too much of a focus on instantaneous response in today's world, both at work and in personal life. If something I can give you is truly preventing you from moving forward then that's fair enough, but otherwise send emails, don't rush the replies, and let people plan their own time.
This may be more of a "me problem" than a "them problem".
I often have the experience that people apologize for being slow to respond to me. Whether they're on the phone, at a counter in person, or whatever. Sometimes they say "oh dear, this computer is so slow today!" or "please bear with me while I check this..." but many times it is a very pointed and pre-emptive statement that they cannot respond or comply with my request immediately, that it may take X number of hours or days or something.
I made a special request to a vendor last year, and the CSR said "oh gosh, we need to reach out to the manufacturer, in Europe, and you know how supply chains are these days... and..." and I literally said "no problem" and eventually, they did not even charge me for the item when it came in, months later. Likewise the dry cleaner always seems to protest that they cannot finish in time and can we please push back the deadline, but I feel like they are trying to shirk my business because they're overwhelmed, too.
And I've come to believe that this is mostly the result of me approaching with impatience and anxiety. I often reach a desk while breathless and make my requests more like demands with the utmost of urgency. I am not, in fact, that impatient, but I give that impression and people believe that I would be disappointed if they take too long. But I do tend to interrupt and distract people if they are trying to collect their thoughts, or figure something out.
My last supervisor used to do this all the time. Practically every email and every voicemail was followed up with apology for being slow. And I really think that he was very gently telling me not to be so impatient and anxious.
But also, there really is a business standard for prompt replies. If someone goes out-of-office, they are usually expected to put up an "OOO autoreply" that will tell you when they're returning. Because it really is business etiquette to respond promptly, or reset expectations by explain why you'll be late.
This would be an absolutely savage way to follow up on an email you never received a reply to three years ago.
does this same guy ruminate when somebody holds a door open for him, or when hes asked how hes doing?
Most people do expect timely replies to emails. If you act like taking days to respond to an email is normal, people will get very upset with you.
I won't. Days is ok. For non-urgent emails, I would only be slightly annoyed if it's been more than a week, and I'll then send a reminder.
It's ok. I know you're busy, take your time and respond at your convenience.
Apologies for this comment!