Is this familiar?
8:53 am: You receive an email from a colleague with a request. You’re in the middle of something and decide to finish what you’re working on and get back to it after.
10:07 am: You come back to the email to respond and the person has already responded “Nevermind–I got what I needed!”.
In most cases though, the person doesn’t even let you know they’ve gotten the answer.
I bet you’ve been the person on the other side of that email too.
This is an issue and a huge time waster.
When you’re the Emailee.
As the person receiving these emails, you likely feel one of two reactions:
- you feel bad that you didn’t get back to them right away and possibly caused them more work than necessary; OR
- you feel annoyed that they emailed you in the first place when clearly they could have done it themselves.
Either way, this has wasted your time and put you in a bad mood, even if momentarily.
Unfortunately, you cannot stop the person from emailing you. However, here are a few suggestions to handle this:
- At the risk of sounding like a broken record, select certain times to check your email. This ensures you are not tempted to respond or it doesn’t take up mental space while you try to do other work.
- Do not respond immediately. Often, if it is urgent or your help is really needed, they will follow-up. This also signals to people that you are not at their beck and call.
- Acknowledge receipt and let them know when you will get back to them. Sometimes they will find someone who can help them more quickly.
- If by the time you check your email you see that they sent it more than an hour prior, shoot them a quick email to see if they still need your help.
- Do NOT apologize for not getting back to them sooner. This is often our default, but if they really needed your help ASAP, they would have called or put a deadline in the email.
- Finally, if this is a persistent behavior with the person emailing you, then bring this to their attention and ask them to include the ways they’ve tried to solve it if they still need your help.
When you’re the Emailer.
We’ve been conditioned to see email as the easy answer. The first roadblock we hit, we shoot someone a quick email rather than solve the problem ourselves. But all that’s really needed is a little extra effort.
As you’ve seen above, showing up in someone’s inbox for something you can do yourself can lead to a negative experience for them. How can we do better?
Here are a few tips:
- Draft the email but don’t send it. Sometimes just the act of writing out what you’re looking for can help you figure out the answer. And if after trying you still need help, you just need to hit send.
- Let them know why you need their help. By explaining how you’ve tried to get the answer yourself, you give the person additional context and show them that you made the effort to solve it on your own first.
- Email them immediately if you get the answer. There’s nothing worse than responding to a request only to have the person respond back saying “Thanks but I already figured it out!”. Be respectful of their time.
- Apologize if you found the answer without their help–you’ve already interrupted their day and you don’t want them to have negative feelings toward you because of that.
Are there other areas where delaying your response can save you time?
