The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

Worth­less worry

Still, many con­stant­ly feel” behind on their emails”. I meet a lot of peo­ple who feel bad about answer­ing much lat­er than they think they ought to. They prob­a­bly feel this way for no good rea­son, since those who feel stressed out by their email are often the ones who tend to over­rate oth­er people’s expec­ta­tions on them in gen­er­al, includ­ing how fast they are to respond.

But just to make things clear and reduce any poten­tial stress, it is a good idea to make it com­plete­ly clear how fast ​”peo­ple” in your con­text and com­pa­ny are in terms of answer­ing and what the expec­ta­tion is so that you can set your lev­el of ambi­tion con­scious­ly and based on facts rather than assumptions.

Do this

If you, like I, think it is a good idea to find out and clar­i­fy if you are respond­ing to emails at an accept­able rate or not, then do this:

1. Look through the emails you have received in the past 1 – 2 weeks and look for those that were respons­es to emails you ini­tial­ly sent.
2. For every one of these respons­es, cal­cu­late how many min­utes it took the recip­i­ent to answer your email and enter these response times in a spreadsheet.
3. When you have com­piled a long ver­ti­cal list of the num­ber of min­utes it took peo­ple to respond, cal­cu­late the aver­age response time.
4. There. Now you have a rough esti­ma­tion of how quick­ly peo­ple you usu­al­ly email with respond to emails (we will leave oth­er and more advanced ana­lyzes of the data for now).
5. Now it is your turn to deter­mine what you feel com­fort­able aim­ing for when it comes to respond­ing your­self. I am guess­ing you are a more or less ambi­tious per­son and there­fore will set a bench­mark that means answer­ing a lit­tle faster than most of your cor­re­spon­dents.
   
   Or, per­haps you are relieved to find that you were much too harsh on your­self and can now be more lenient with your­self with­out feel­ing bad about it? Or, per­haps you draw some oth­er conclusion?
6. From now on, you can rely on the lit­tle empir­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tion you did when you start to feel stressed out over emails again and know that as long as you are man­ag­ing to reply with­in the time­frame you set for your­self, you are doing alright. You are at least as fast as oth­ers in your vicin­i­ty are on average.

No wor­ries or cause for concern?

If you set a time­frame for your respons­es to oth­er people’s emails based on data and facts rather than your assump­tions, you will know when you can give your­self some slack and when there is an actu­al cause for con­cern and you should get mov­ing.

Instead of feel­ing as if the emails are con­stant­ly ​”hang­ing over you”, you decide (at least to a greater extent) when to deal with your unread cor­re­spon­dence and when you will do oth­er, more impor­tant, things.

What’s your way?

What is your per­son­al ambi­tion when it comes to how quick­ly you respond to emails? Do you have your own per­son­al bench­mark or tar­get to lean on and use as a ref­er­ence when pri­or­i­tiz­ing? Email me and share your thoughts and ways. 

(By the way, do you know the sev­en rules of e‑mailing eti­quette which sim­pli­fies your e‑mailing?)