People Twitter

“After careful consideration of your proposal, I will not be attending lunch with you last Friday.”

This is one of several reasons I eventually ditched Facebook... People would text me a bunch of bullshit drama on FB messenger while I was at work and couldn't stop to look at it, then start sending me more messages asking why I wasn't responding lol

One of the principal engineers I used to know had this as theirs:

"I don't always respond to emails on time. If you need me to respond immediately, come to my desk Mon-Wed to say hello. If I'm not there, wait until Mon. If you're in a different country, book a plane ticket the week prior and speak to me on Mon."

The funny part is that they didn't have a desk, and were almost always in a different office to where they were supposed to be.

So basically a business week to respond to everything

edit: stop replying to this to tell me I'm a monster for expecting email to be a thing. I honestly don't care, and all you're doing is telling me you have a weird gen z hangup about email, and that you are a problem at your workplace and that you frustrate your coworkers.

What the hell is in those e-mails that requires 2 days of pondering?

This seems really pompous and self important to me. Most people know to not expect an immediate response. I know it’s a joke but to say “it will take me 4 days to acknowledge you” is strange.

Almost 2 decades ago I figured out that, from the very start in a new job, you have to train others to not expect constant availability and immediate response from you.

Things like "work phone and work e-mail are only for work hours" and only checking e-mails once in a while rather than being a slave-to-notifications interrupting anything I might be doing to check any e-mail coming in and replying to it (if you know the psychology of effective working, externally driven frequent interruptions is one of the most unproductive ways to work and is needlessly stressful).

It's pretty hard getting away with changing this later after people have already baked in expectations about your "availability" (personally, I never succeeded in that), but it works if you're doing this kind of "flow control" up front and reliably do eventually get around to look into and addressing whatever people sent you - in fact you're likely more reliable than those providing "immediate availability" because it's a lot easier to have things under control and naturally prioritise by importance, so important stuff won't just "fall to the bottom of the pile" because a bunch of fresh requests came in distracting you away from the more important stuff and you forgot about it.

There are other, more indirect upsides, such as "shit they can solve themselves" from other people seldom getting to you because they know you won't immediatelly drop everything to solve any problem of theirs, so won't just mail you and sit on their arses waiting and instead have a go or two at it themselves and "self-solving problems" (the kind of stuff that turns out not to be a problem but instead a misinterpretation or are caused by temporary conditions elsewhere and out of your control) solving themselves before you get around to looking into them,

That said, I do have a hierarchy of access, with e-mails being treated as less urgent and phone calls as more urgent, though even in the latter I'll consistently (consistency is important in managing other people's expectations) push back - i.e. "send me an e-mail and I'll look into it when I have availability" - if somebody calls me with stuff that's not important and urgent enough to justify using that "channel".

All this to say that for me what's in this post just looks like a more advanced version of what I do for time management, productivity and stress control.

In my experience, it's normal for people to just never respond to emails.

Maybe the answer is to have a proper inbox tray. The business doesn’t really understand that we (as in software developers) don’t even know that email exists. We’re not colour coding everything that comes in and cleaning them up when they’re processed, and we will not see your email amid all the auto-generated crap.

It's interesting to read the comments here. Without taking a stance, it looks like everyone has a different personal experience in terms of how fast their life circle expects them to respond digitally.

Must be a geologist.

Being able to prioritize what needs to be done now and what could take 4 days, and what can simply not be done is an art.

Both on the sender and de receiver.

Here's the thing. If it's from someone internal, we have instant messaging if say u want some kind of message instantly. If I get an email, I'm assuming I have time to action it. If I'm not busy, sure, I'll action it right away, but if I am and I see an email come in from someone internal not marked high importance, there's a good chance I'm not even reading it for like 2-3 hours maybe more. I absolutely hate when someone sends an email and a follow up like an hour later. If it's urgent, u need to convey that in some way, shape, or form.