Email Etiquette

[Elle]

People I work with have imo fully psychotic ideas about email response times. So I'm curious how it is for people in different lines of work. What is a reasonable response time for different kinds of email? They have greater and lesser urgencies, I presume. How regularly are you expected to check, or how often do you think you should be expected to check?

What about emails from your kids' various school things?

[Mike]

24 hours on most things. If it's more important than that, you have a dozen other ways to reach me. Don't blame me if you're intimidated by more direct interaction.

[Cazmonster]

It is email. It is by its very nature one-sided.

Anyone who has an expectation of swift response to an email is wrong. Two-sided communication, like a phone call, or a face to face, are the only ways to expect real time response.

Fast Company published research that said 23 hours and 2 hours are the outliers.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3058066/how ... e-to-email

[Tahlvin]

Having worked in project managemt installing software for a major healthcare software vendor, they train you to not rely on email at all for important communication. Call or talk face to face and use email as follow up and confirm what was discussed. If you ask questions by email, expect at least 24 hours for a response, maybe longer, and be prepared to follow up via phone or other method if you get no response. And be careful who the email is addressed to, who is CC'd, and who needs to answer any questions in the email; if you're vague, they'll think someone else is responsible for answering.

[Elle]

This doesn't always work, but I try to organize things according to the seriousness of my obligation to the emailer multiplied by the relative urgency of their request. If doing my job well requires that I respond to you, and you've got an important request, you're on top of the list and get an answer that same day. If I don't have much obligation to you and your request isn't urgent, you're simply not getting a reply for a while. I'm semi-astonished that people have so abandoned norms of etiquette as to demand that others be on call for them 24/7. If I cannot take your phone call right now, then it will go to voice mail/message. If I cannot take your email right now, then you have to wait. The people who prompted my curiosity about this were pissed off when strangers with whom they had only loose professional associations were not willing to respond within 24-48 hours to their requests. If you email me without our having a prior acquaintance, it's going to take me 24-48 hours just to discover your email is in my spam/clutter. Then I have to figure out who you are and what you want. So yeah, it takes a little while. But now I'm kind of nervous because it turns out I am some kind of outlier/offender with this stuff, and I can expect people to be annoyed by it.