This past Saturday, I wrote my Shortcuts column on why people don’t respond to e-mails. And boy, did I get a lot of responses. Clearly many readers out there are fuming over their in-boxes.
One reader, Marc Allan of Indianapolis, e-mailed to tell me that when he didn’t get a response, “I would send another one with the subject line: ‘Are you still alive?’ I would then say: ‘When someone doesn’t respond to my e-mails, I worry that they suffered an untimely death. Please reassure me you are still alive.’ That always got a response. Now, though, I’m just going to send them Alina Tugend’s article, using the headline as the subject. So, thanks for that.”
Um, you’re welcome. I guess.
Another reader, Rick Wolfe, said he thought the problem has been getting worse. “Many is the e-mail that receives no reply. If I’ve sent an e-mail invitation to a business event, it doesn’t surprise me that many people don’t reply. When I’ve sent a personal message to a longtime colleague, the non-reply produces the range of emotions and tactics you suggested in your column.”
Mr. Wolfe was not the only reader who said he wished someone would come up with a good tool to address one of the problems — did the person I sent the e-mail to actually get it? Or even better, actually read it? A reader called Joey suggested that “perhaps the whassapp/facebook mechanism that enables the sender to know if recipient has read the message can be incorporated into e-mail. I hope the Google e-mail team will take notice of your article and help solve the issue of no reply. “
Others pointed out reasons e-mails are sometimes answered late or not at all. Mike from Maryland wrote, “The older chair of my university department used to send out e-mails on Friday. Often late Friday. Usually asking about something that involved calling university staff, who are often hard to reach and gone by Friday afternoon. If you did not respond by Monday morning, he thought you were late or not doing your job!”
He offered some good advice: “When you send an e-mail with the expectation of a reply, you need to ask yourself: when would this person likely see it? When can they first address the problem? When do I need a response by? If one of these is a problem, pick up the phone and call them.”
Tom Walker said he thought the article “touches upon a deeper business management question: is e-mail (just e-mail) a net positive or net negative in terms of efficiently using time and resources. Communication more and more replaces procedures,” he wrote. “Specifically, business problems get pushed around by e-mail instead of creating a process for dealing with them. This also blurs accountability.”
One reader wrote to say that people may not respond to e-mails because they don’t want to put anything in writing. That’s true, but then pick up the phone.
A reader noted the comment by a former film executive that in the film world, “No response is the new no.” For the younger generation, the reader said, it’s, in fact, the new yes.
As she noted: “A senior in college showed up to one of my on-location film shoots without permission or reason, and when I asked her for an explanation she told me, ‘Well, I e-mailed you and you didn’t respond.’”
Steven Ludsin of East Hampton, N.Y., has a philosophical approach. “Sometimes I write to the universe and it doesn’t write back,” he told me in an e-mail. “As they say in the Peanuts world, life goes on.”
And John Lin of Mountain View, Calif., sent an excellent quote he read way back in 1994 in The New Yorker magazine. “By making it so easy to communicate with people, e-mail changes the nature of communications; but e-mail also, I now know, changes the nature of silence. The silence of no e-mail is unlike the silence of a quiet telephone or an empty mailbox. It is thunderous.”
Judging from reader responses, almost 20 years later, that is more true now than ever.
Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/no-e-mail-response-life-goes-on/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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