What Your Email Response Time Says About You
I read an article in The Daily Mail called “Email etiquette: What your response time reveals about your personality”. From the Article by Liz Hull: It’s usually considered polite when a friend or colleague replies to your email promptly. But such a swift response may have a downside – it may mean the sender is stressed or has low self-esteem, according to research.
I read an article in The Daily Mail called “Email etiquette: What your response time reveals about your personality”.
From the Article by Liz Hull:
It’s usually considered polite when a friend or colleague replies to your email promptly.
But such a swift response may have a downside – it may mean the sender is stressed or has low self-esteem, according to research.
Now, I’m not sure about you, but when I get an email if I have the time available (and I’m at a computer obviously!) I reply straight away as:
- It’s polite
- I hate the inevitable follow-up “did you get my email” conversion/phone call/email/post-it
But then maybe that’s because the article goes on to say:
Women, in particular, felt more pressure to respond quickly to a new email than men, she said.
I think the most worrying point of the article is:
The research revealed that employees working on a computer typically switched applications to view their emails as many as 30 or 40 times an hour, for anything from a few seconds to a minute.
Thiry or Forty times an hour? Do these people have no other work to do? Have they not heard of notification or setting up defined times to batch process email?
Check out the article to see some other slightly worrying stats about how people use their email. I’d be interested to hear how often and how quickly your reply to yours – let us know in the comments or Contact Me
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