“Email-Responsiveness” – Learning the Art of Email Correspondence

I get really frustrated when someone does not reply to my messages within 24 hours! Most of the time you get a reply only after you've politely (but persistently) badgered them a few times? The crazy thing is that even though I know how annoying this can get, I have done this with others myself. So, I thought it would be good idea to find out why this happens and if there are any know ways to improve my email responsiveness.

People typically give quick replies to two types of people:

• whose immediate cooperation they need in order to get their own job done
• who badger them persistently enough to make them feel uncomfortable or embarrassingly inefficient

There is a high chance if you don’t fall in the above two categories, then forget getting a response within 24 hours. The weird thing is that they are not doing deliberately. So, why does it happen then? Let’s try to figure out!

It’s extremely tempting to leave an email in the inbox as a reminder to reply. So these messages loiter around in the inbox until the user gets around to answering them.

So your inbox gets clogged up with messages that you have already read but have not taken any action on. Such messages tend to get buried and forgotten, and at best you end up wasting time re-re-reading them while scanning your inbox.

I found two interesting and very simple suggestions by people to get your max response time within 24 hours.

The first Solution :

1. Need to reply but don't have time right now? Drag the message into a special folder, entitled "Reply", that holds all the messages that need replying to.
2. Schedule a couple of times a day, every day, in which to crank though the Reply folder, during which you shoot off the necessary answers and file the messages elsewhere.

Note: I don’t know how this method will manage the case when you don't have time to formulate a reply to a complex or time-consuming issue

The second solution:

An alternative solution suggested is to file every email immediately, but to put a flag on those which need a reply; then to just work through your folders. This approach means there is no need to move emails first into a special reply folder, and then move them again once you’ve replied to them - though at the cost of having to set and later clear a flag. For longer e-mails they suggest to save your response in drafts, and finish them periodically.

The author of the technique says that he files the email after having read and flagged them. Then he works his way through relevant folders as and when he has time. Thus the emails are always there in the right folders with the relevant other emails etc and when he has dealt with it, he simply clears the flag and the email is already filed with the reply.

The second technique seems more effective to me. However, will it solve the email-responsive problem in totality? Let me try both ways for some time and I will let you know!