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Chapter Four
Balancing Connectivity and Productivity
The battle of the inbox is waged on two sides. The first is getting things done and
making sure answering emails doesn’t take up your entire day. Depending on your
position, you may be faced with a huge email problem of dozens of messages each
day. This is the productivity angle, and it’s the one I’ve been covering.
The other side of this war is connectivity. Staying connected with people through
email and making sure your quick and dirty email habits don’t turn you into a jerk. I
completely understand when someone wants to speed up their email habits. But I
also have pet peeves when the way they do this damages our communication.
You’ll need to come up with your own rules for communicating effectively. I’ll offer my
guidelines, but ultimately, they are only based on my experiences. The types of email
habits that irritate me might work for you. I suggest you consider some of these
email habits and ask yourself whether they are impacting your emailing.
Delayed Replies.
1.
Ignoring Emails that Have a Request.
2.
Overusing Reply to All and Mailing Lists
3.
Bad Autoresponders
4.
Poor Grammar and Chatspeak
5.
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1. Delayed Replies
Assuming you empty your inbox once every day or two, I should expect a response to
my email within a day or two. Yet it’s common to wait more than a week to receive a
reply to an email. I think it’s ironic that people who are unwilling to batch emails be-
cause they don’t want to wait are often the same people who will delay a response
for over a week.
The biggest reason for a delayed reply is that you:
t Don’t have the information to respond yet
t Still need to make a decision
t Don’t have the time to write out a full answer
The rationale is that if you can’t write a perfect email yet, you should wait until you
get the information you need for your reply. I disagree with this philosophy because
with spam filters and accidental deletes, I’m going to be worried you never read my
first email.
Instead, I suggest w