You have own right to choose the response time for any communication be it at work or at play. Devices have connected us 24 by 7 online. But that does not mean you have to respond instantly to everything you have been presented to. Its right time you chose to exercise that right. At first, being reachable all the time felt good. Professionals started using BlackBerries 20 years ago, smartphones followed. Businesses were conducted on the go. People were empowered. But as more people got mobile devices, responding to messages anytime became the norm among co-workers as well as friends and loved ones. The empowerment morphed into an obligation.
If technologies offer you possibility of responding to every communication on the go, it becomes a measuring parameter of dedication of people as workers or devotion as a family member. Not responding can suggest that they aren’t dedicated enough. Now when people feel they haven’t responded sufficiently quickly, they think they owe their correspondent an apology.
This is not unique to the internet and instant communication. Nineteenth-century letter-writers were constantly apologizing for and explaining their delays when they felt that a socially unacceptable amount of time had passed. But what’s changed in the past 10 to 20 years, with the mass adoption of email and smartphones, is that the “acceptable” window of response time has gotten much smaller. Someone could conceivably apologize for their delay when responding in the afternoon to an email sent that morning.
Is the sin of delaying your response so harmful that you need to render apology. Idleness or mere appearance of it is considered as a shortcoming and doing that has its own consequences/ This is especially true at work: Even if being responsive at all hours has no bearing on an employee’s actual productivity, many bosses lazily use it as a proxy for gauging workers’ value.
Outside work, a delayed response can cause genuine problems too. If your partner texts you “I love you,” responding two days later is not a good idea. In personal communications, a lack of a speedy response risks signaling a lack of care. After all, your phone was right there.
But aside from these potential tricky situations, the consequences of not responding quickly may not be as serious as we fear. It is usually that the recipients of non-urgent after-hours emails tended to overestimate how quickly they needed to reply, and that senders tended to underestimate how stressful those messages were for recipients.
Our expectations for how quickly others expect us to respond are mostly incorrect. Often, we later realize that actually people were okay if we had taken our time. And yet we go around apologizing to one another constantly for our delays.
More and more of our communication is shifting to email and messaging apps. We quickly amass a large backlog of messages that are waiting for our reply. Between email, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Instagram, and many more, there is an almost constant influx of communication that expects our reciprocation. And along with that we feel increasing guilt and dread as well. Worse, the longer we wait, the harder it seems it is to finally sit down and write that response.
When you eventually get around to replying chances are you’ll open your message with something like “Apologies for the delayed response,” or “Sorry I couldn’t get back to you sooner,” or “I’m sorry, I totally overlooked your message till now.”
Skipping the apology is a great filter. In most cases, the only people to take issue with the lack of apology are those who expect you to reply on their schedule without any regard for your time or other commitments. Those who really care about you and appreciate your time likely won’t mind.
So it is a good idea to stop making an apology of our default, reserving one only for cases where we really should have been speedier. As a result, we can feel much more relaxed about our inbox and even experience less dread about replying to “overdue” messages.
So far, no one seems to have been offended by it. Not to mention that in most cases the guilt is probably entirely self-created, and the person we are writing to likely doesn’t even consider our response slow. People may even appreciate people who take some time to reply.
It’s time to redefine what replying “in time” means. Replying at a more moderate pace sets the right expectations. We’re expected to be reachable all the time, without ever questioning whether we really should be (or want to be). By apologizing for a slow response, we just reinforce that behavior.
When someone sends you a message, they are essentially adding a task to your to-do list. You should at least be able to decide by yourself when you want to get to this task you didn’t choose for yourself.
Maybe this is a slightly silly and extreme analogy, but with some people it can almost feel like they come over to your house, invite themselves in at random hours, and expect you to drop everything you’d been doing to have a rambling chat with them. And you don’t stop them. Instead, you apologize because it takes you some time to serve them a hot beverage.
Of course, there’s also the option to ignore or delete messages from our inboxes completely. This might sound harsh, but not everyone who wants us to prioritize our response to them deserves it.
Prioritize unapologetically, and think quality over quantity. Even if they do, our time, energy, and attention are finite. Spending more time on a few messages that are really important and meaningful to us (and the recipient) has a much greater positive impact than spreading ourselves thin and trying to please everyone.
While we may be dealing with the matters of importance but it’s a time to realize that there is nothing ‘super mission-critical’ about what we do despite however badly we ourselves would want it to look like.
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