Office dynamics: Your email does not constitute my emergency

NEW YORK: One morning last summer, I sent a rough draft of a speech to a colleague for feedback. Even though it was a long read and she was away at a conference, she sent me her initial comments that very evening. “Sorry for the delay,” she wrote.

I hadn’t expected to hear back from her that week, let alone that day. She wasn’t late. But she felt the need to apologise anyway. It turns out she wasn’t alone. When I searched my emails from last year, “sorry for the delay” appeared 547 times.

Apologising for slow replies is a symptom of unrealistic demands in an always-on culture. Work is presumed to be the dominant force in our lives. Instead of making space for leisure and rest, we have to keep monitoring our communication channels, ready to drop everything at any time. Being reachable around the clock means living at the mercy of other people’s calendars. It’s a recipe for burnout. And it prizes shallow reactions over deep reflection. We wind up rushing to get things done instead of doing them well.

When it comes to email, however, most of what’s in your inbox is less urgent than it appears.

In a series of experiments, the researchers Laura Giurge and Vanessa Bohns demonstrated what they call an email urgency bias. When people received emails outside work hours, they thought senders expected faster replies than they did. The more recipients believed they needed to respond quickly, the more stressed they felt — and the more they tended to struggle with burnout and work-life balance.

The stress was mitigated when senders took a simple step: communicating their expectations. Just saying something like “This isn’t urgent, so get to it whenever you can” was enough to alleviate the perceived pressure to respond quickly. And clarifying expectations isn’t just good for our well-being: Evidence from the transition to remote work during the pandemic shows that when managers are explicit about their communication expectations — including target response times — their employees report being more productive and effective in their daily tasks.

When we place too high a priority on the speed of our email replies, we destroy our ability to focus. Interruptions derail our train of thought and wreak havoc on our progress. When you know you don’t have to reply to emails right away, you can actually find flow and dedicate your full attention where you wish.

In a Dutch financial services company, certain employees were asked to change their email notifications. Instead of replying continuously, they blocked out two or three periods a day to respond in batches. For some participants, this batching reduced burnout in the short term, especially if their inboxes were overflowing. The researchers concluded, however, “that email batching should not be regarded as panacea for enhancing well-being.”

One of the silver linings of the Covid era is that people became more thoughtful about communicating digital boundaries — and more understanding about accepting them. We saw an explosion of email signature lines like “My work hours may not be your work hours” and “Answer at your convenience.” We can’t let that boundary-setting vanish with the pandemic. We need it to become endemic.