They feel guilty for not answering sooner and they are letting that known. It makes life beautiful.
The quantity of apologies I write in email replies is directly correlated to how overworked I am from existing in a reality where the existence of unproven tooling causes more work to be put on my plate without any realistic avenues to manage it. When everything is urgent, it can be impolite to be explicit about your priorities, but waiting to reply implicitly makes the point that something else was more important, and that is something which has political consequences, especially in business. Ultimately, like any element of etiquette, it's about smoothing over the rough edges so we can all get along and to assuage any feelings that the other person may have that they got stiffed.
I wish things worked the way the author thinks things work, and maybe it does in the world of academia or wherever this person is insulated from the consequences of late-stage capitalism and the gnat-like attention span that social media has inculcated into the global population. But in the business world, especially in the US, and especially in 2025 onward, there is an expectation that every individual person can do the job of a team of 6, and that responses need to be done with urgency to every missive. That's clearly an unrealistic and unfair expectation, but because all of us want to avoid being starving and homeless, we do our best to meet that expectation anyway, hence why burnout is epidemic and we all hate the current timeline.
It's ok. I know you're busy, take your time and respond at your convenience.
I am not personally upset if people don't get to my emails right away, because if I have anything actually urgent I'll get a Teams message out to the person who I know can handle it. (That does change a bit if the communication to to an external vendor in which case it's going to their support team who I do expect to respond promptly).
Or at least make it funny.
I stopped treating my inbox as an obligation and I reply at my own pace. I still give each email as much consideration as I can, but I no longer feel that it’s required. Some emails go unanswered.
I am slowly working on setting boundaries, especially in response to expectations that I did not opt into. It’s indeed a very contextual reply.
In email communications with friends, it varies. I'll often let conversations hang for a while until there's something new to discuss.
Different stroke for different folks, but I'm still very much in the paradigm where email is more like a letter in the mail, not like a text message, IM, or "please return my call" voicemail. [0]
Of course I recognize that email is often used for time-sensitive matters (like scheduling events), but any time I see an email that is likely to require multiple timely backs-and-forths I'll try to move the conversation to a more suitable medium.
[0] Here I'm referring to solicited emails sent by humans or transactional emails triggered directly by a human interaction. In practice our email inboxes also serve as a general "notifications hub" for all sorts of things including recurring events ("remember to pay your bill") and, of course, unsolicited junk.
I moved from a company that operated under that paradigm (Slack was the primary mode of internal comms) to one that treats email as the primary mode of comms. It was a minor challenge to start watching my inbox and keep it at zero-unread (something I don't care about at all in my personal emails). Feels natural to me now when I'm in work-mode.
I can tell you that those banks, government agencies, and hospitals know how to backdate letters, postmark them like clockwork, and land in my mailbox on a Friday at close of business on a 3-day weekend, just to jam us up and narrow any deadline that may exist.
Even a hand-delivered notice from the landlady shows up at 6:01pm when the office is already closed. I guarantee that you will be helpless to respond in a timely fashion.
It has been suggested that "bankers hours" and 9-5 office hours were originated specifically to jam up the working man, who needed to be in the mines or on the factory floor during those hours. If a bank actually wanted to serve working people, they would be open on weekends. Traditionally it was not something your wife or kids could proxy, if they did not drive or have authorization, but the single working man was doubly screwed in these situations.
This year I also have the experience of very premature "billing notices" sent to my email and text and every other place, where the bureaucrats are counting on impatience to pay a bill far too early, before it is due, luring you in with ambiguous wording. People today are warning "do not comply in advance" and I am observing this maxim with health care billing in particular.
I view my email once per week. If you need an immediate answer from me, I expect you to send me a slack/chat/pagerduty warning, even one that says "I sent you an email, I need answer by tomorrow".
It's always better to explain yourself, otherwise, it looks unprofessional if you reply after a week as though it's normal.
Overall, the recommendations about email look very personal to the author and perhaps shouldn't be taken as general advice.
I don’t owe an explanation to anyone.
If something is critical, you can communicate via other means: phone calls, SMS, slack, etc.. and even then, there's no guarantee you will get a response.
In business context, I lean the other way, tend to give all parties as much leg room as possible.
I think The Eisenhower Method is a great fit for prioritization.
And if it's a cold email requesting something beyond a reply, and you don't have an existing business relationship with the sender, there is no expectation that you respond. An endless stream of requests from less reputable entities is an unavoidable fact of academic life. Such requests often go directly to the spam folder, as people have collectively decided that they are spam and trained the spam filters accordingly. Even if you think your request is legitimate, it can be indistinguishable from spam.
So I tried it once; no reply. (A month or two after it was published too, not something that might've been difficult to dig up.) Probably straight to spam.
Sounds funny because I only read mails when someone tell me about them on MSTeams.
Between IM, supports tickets and jira stories I don't really see the point of emails anymore. If it is something that has an SLA tickets seem to be the way to go, if not Teams. If it is an urgent matter, mentioning my name or calling me will be a quicker way to go. Email seem to be in that weird place where some people still seem to want to insert invisible business matters in an ocean of junk and automatized mails/notifications you generally never subscribe yourself but ends up subscribed by default when given access to resources/applications.
Email works because: (a) it is ubiquitous, (b) you don't have to pay for some proprietary software to use it, (c) you remain in control of your data (no IM messages suddenly disappearing), (d) you have a permanent, local, copy of what was said in writing, (e) it's often the standard court-recognised form of communication, other than post, for things that matter legally (e.g. sending notices).
That's not to say that email isn't without many defects. But it's still the best we have for many work-related use cases.
Each communication tool has its strengths, namely managing interruptions.
People using one’s attention as their inbox directly with DM vs a when you can get to it email can be easily mismanaged.
It’s different for each job.
Usually it is unimportant, and the other side is just wasting their time.
More generally, though, the response can be as simple as "We have received this email; the request will take some time, here's roughly when you can expect an update."
If I ask a quote, get it, and answer only 2w later, I will probably apologize. If someone sends me a quote unprovoked, they shouldn't have any expectations of getting an answer, and if I answer even late, I won't apologize.
If my boss or people working on my project send me an email to get a status on something and it takes me a week to answer, I'll apologize- even if that's because I was busy on something more important. If a random colleague asks me for something unrelated with my direct responsibilities, similarly I'll get to it if I get to it when I get to it, and I dont think they should have expectations of receiving an answer, so I won't apologize
Your important might not be mine, and that's perfectly fine. Professionals negotiate that difference, instead of unilaterally deciding the other is blowing them off.
If your question needs a answer within 24 hours , give me a call and I will do my best to answer. If you send me an email, without any clear urgency, I will respond when I have time. Typically within a week.
I might be slower to reply to something important because I need the time to get the reply right.
don't expect replies over weekends and holidays
-Donald Knuth
In 2026 email is the most time-respecting communication medium other than a classic, physical letter.
> It also puts a lot of pressure on me: what if I take more time than you to reply? Isn’t the whole point of asynchronous communication to be… asynchronous? Each on its own rhythm?
This one of those sentiments that makes me scratch my head. If this little thing makes you uncomfortable to the point that you need to write a blog post about it, how do you survive?
Not the author, but I'd wager it's an evolving story over many years. At first, you ignore it entirely. It might not even register at first, or if it does, it's just a barely conscious "huh, this interaction makes me feel weird" sort of deal. And you leave it be. But then death by a thousand cuts later, you're irritated by this habit and want to speak out against it. And so, you write a blog post about why it's bad or annoying or whatever. And then you go back to surviving another day.
It is common courtesy, not a big deal.
ARTHUR: Sorry.
GOD: And don't apologize. Every time I talk to someone it's sorry this, and, forgive me that, and, I'm not worthy.
When the main form of long distance communication was the postal system, and letters took days to travel from sender to receiver, you could easily wait days, if not weeks, to draft up your reply and mail it out. The recipient on the other end wouldn't even be able to discern the difference between your delay and the delay from the postal network itself. It had some in-built slack.
When the only phones were landlines, if someone called you and you knew you were in a bad mood, the kind of bad mood that would invariably make you say something stupid, you could just not pick up! There were plenty of common, understandable reasons someone wouldn't be available to answer their landline. Then they could leave you a message, and you could call back when you mood improved again. Again, there was slack built into the system.
Now there's this cultural expectation that puts far more attention on your reaction speed. A text message with no immediate response could just be them not seeing it immediately... But actually no! Now we have read receipts too! You can't even pretend to have not seen it yet while you think of your reply. Some platforms even have the little "currently typing" indicator tell them how long you've spent drafting and re-drafting whatever message you ended up sending. A panopticon of communication. Now there's no slack. Any person anywhere in the world could try and get a hold of you with the same expectation of immediacy that a face-to-face conversation would supply.
Now of course, not every single person I might text, call, or send an email to, will have the same expectations for what is an appropriate degree of responsiveness. But, (speaking from my personal experience) I am absolutely miserable at reading that from social clues. I am left having to assume that, in the absence of some clear indicator to the contrary, whoever I am writing to will actually have rather strict expectations, and that allowing myself to be lax may very well give them a terrible opinion of me. (Though, the degree to which their opinion of me actually matters is a different question entirely!)
I don't think many people in the real world worship the sanctity of the "Asynchronous Communication" principle above all else. Maybe the author is the 1/1000 that does.
Good, but like all good things, top posting is why we can't have good things.
It isn't going to stop.
For people who like to see waving three dots in iPhone chat, e-mailing makes them anxious. So I understand that apology is quite normal.
It is a sort of generational difference, imho.
Also, just because I send some text as HTML doesn't prevent in any way the receiver from formatting that however they want. I'm just adding some display hints, that their email client may or may not ignore.
I do like the idea of asking the sender to reply a few weeks/months later.
1. Quick email saying “acknowledge, will work on a reply with estimate target date”
2. Proper reply ideally by target.
Guilty as charged.
I don't understand why everyone below is discussing how a person treats his own personal emails.
Kind of like LLMs.
It's largely irrelevant for any technical reason today, but the old greybeards still cling to it (I'm one of them).
I often have the experience that people apologize for being slow to respond to me. Whether they're on the phone, at a counter in person, or whatever. Sometimes they say "oh dear, this computer is so slow today!" or "please bear with me while I check this..." but many times it is a very pointed and pre-emptive statement that they cannot respond or comply with my request immediately, that it may take X number of hours or days or something.
I made a special request to a vendor last year, and the CSR said "oh gosh, we need to reach out to the manufacturer, in Europe, and you know how supply chains are these days... and..." and I literally said "no problem" and eventually, they did not even charge me for the item when it came in, months later. Likewise the dry cleaner always seems to protest that they cannot finish in time and can we please push back the deadline, but I feel like they are trying to shirk my business because they're overwhelmed, too.
And I've come to believe that this is mostly the result of me approaching with impatience and anxiety. I often reach a desk while breathless and make my requests more like demands with the utmost of urgency. I am not, in fact, that impatient, but I give that impression and people believe that I would be disappointed if they take too long. But I do tend to interrupt and distract people if they are trying to collect their thoughts, or figure something out.
My last supervisor used to do this all the time. Practically every email and every voicemail was followed up with apology for being slow. And I really think that he was very gently telling me not to be so impatient and anxious.
But also, there really is a business standard for prompt replies. If someone goes out-of-office, they are usually expected to put up an "OOO autoreply" that will tell you when they're returning. Because it really is business etiquette to respond promptly, or reset expectations by explain why you'll be late.
If you are serious and down to business, taking into consideration the cultural bit over the efficiency or value of the relationship is backwards; apart from taking hints about manners and future expectations of communication with your correspondent.
Get over it. No one is doing it for your benefit. They're providing a secondary signal about their own workload. Just ignore it if you cannot make use of it.
For instance my observation is that people in the USA will tend to give you a lot of unrequested information like all their health/medical problems or the sports games of their kid and what not. People in europe seems to be more private unless they are talking with very close coworker they would consider as friends.
Almost nobody writes, "I am sorry I was scrolling Twitter and Hacker News while ignoring my e-mail. Fortunately, I have stopped and now can respond!"
The same for : "How are you ?", "I hope this email finds you well" or worse than everything, Emails Greetings embedded into the signature.
This is self-defeating. You have the option (and I recommend it) to intentionally adopt the opposite assumption:
Zero communication is urgent, unless explicitly described as such.
It might be appropriate to make exceptions for certain people. Parents, partners, children. Maybe some work people during a crunch. Maybe some friends going through difficult times.
The vast majority people didn't yet use email back when bottom posting was good etiquette and top posting was discouraged. They're simply not aware of the concepts, or the controversy, at all. Even old-fashioned snail mail letters, for those who still remember such things, didn't usually include quoted passages, even though getting a reply to one's letter could easily take weeks if not months.
I remember around the time top-posting had taken over, someone on a mailing list being upset about having their mail cut up and quoted inline by someone else. Can imagine today many might react like that if they ever encounter nicely formatted mail replies.
I felt people were unwilling to take the responsibility for communicating properly, and so they took the easy route where they could shrug their shoulders and say "I included all the context."
I only ever got complaints from people who were confused by the quoting style or didn't know what the email was about. I'm not sure if it's still true, but at the time, Outlook didn't use threaded view mode by default and most people didn't know about it. FWIW I work in manufacturing and not in tech, I expect the level of competence in tech is a little higher, though I also hear how people moan about having to learn the tools they use every day, so maybe there's little difference.
I even started to avoid inline responses and comments, many find even that confusing.
then enforce it by policy across the org, and watch the chaos as people read before speaking.
She's part of a certain digital generation, and expectations change.
A younger PM I'm working with right now emailed me twice in a few hours because I didn't immediately sign into their management platform after our 4pm meeting. Granted, that's her job, but the project doesn't officially start for a few more months.
I cut every communication tool settings that enable online status or "typing..." information. It sets unreasonable expectations no one should have (but in contextual requests on the spot).
I feel squeezed in the middle between antsy-verbose zoomer emailers and terse boomer emailers that hit me with ambiguous 5 word replies or those godforsaken emojii email reacts.
My decree is that 95% of emails should be three sentences double-spaced. 5% should be paragraphs. Hypertext is permissible almost entirely because of quote formatting, which should be used liberally so that each email is as self-contained as possible.
I recall my mother’s family conversing via mail in the early 80’s - and she would write one 10 page letter a month as a reply (max) - that would 3 or 4 mails a year with any particular sibling (and probably 1 phone call - but phone calls to alaska were expensive, and you wouldn’t say all you wanted to).
I think the cultural norm is to respond as quickly as possible. Realistically that is so challenging.
im talking about business not grandma
You don't know my email address either so that's ok!
I get what you're saying and agree email is almost always the least common denominator between two different organizations.
On the flip side, this can really vary based on the relationship between two orgs and how closely they might work with each other. I've definitely had Teams instances with outside users and Slack channels shared between multiple orgs when there's a lot of close daily collaboration happening.
https://slack.com/blog/collaboration/slack-shared-channels
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/communicate...
Frequently email threads have an assortment of people from 3-4 different companies on them, the specific set of which I will never talk to again outside of that inquiry.
On the rep agency side, they might each represent 50-100 different manufacturers and I'm sure are not eager to have a different ticketing system or chat app channel for contacting each one of them.
Nobody ever expect a reply within 24hour from someone outside of your organization, unless these terms have been set already that you are working on a common project with strict deadlines.
if you are sending me a message that says: answer or i'll delete this chat, which means break up, and i am not even able to see the message, let alone respond, so i have no clue whats going on, then i effectively learn that you don't trust me and that you'll assume the worst whenever something happens. that's a character trait that i can't handle. which means we are not fit to be together.
you are right, as in your other comment that this depends on established communication patterns, and if i know that my partner gets anxious when i don't respond quickly enough then, like you suggest i'd let my partner know in advance. but you could also have a situation where you can't do that. the phone breaks, you get into an accident, or you are so sick or tired that you fall asleep before you have a chance to send a message...
i would not respond with a counter-ultimatum. that's the thing. ultimatums should never be used in a relationship. breaking up is a step i would take after the conversation, if i come to the conclusion that my partner thinks it is ok to threaten me like that. i had a partner do that to me three times over the course of half a year. after the third time i had enough. i realized that this is part of her usual behavior, and she will continue doing that whenever something upsets her to much. she refused counseling too. so i said good bye, we are not fit for each other. i never threatened to leave myself. i tried to find out what is upsetting her and resolve it. i had to realize that this was part of her character and that i would not be able to keep going. i had no motivation to try to change her. that's generally futile anyways.
Ah, the classic "fuck the neurodivergent" stance.
It's perfectly fine to ask people to change be careful in their correspondence to a specific person to avoid certain issues.
It's not fine, however, even for neuro divergent people, to expect social norms to change for everyone to match their particular preferences.
If we read the original article as representing a request from the author to specifically not answer emails to them by apologizing for replying late, that's a perfectly fine request that anyone corresponding with them should follow (once they become aware of it). If we read it as a general recommendation to everyone to change this clear social norm, then it's not fine, the justification given (one person finds this puts some kind of pressure on them, and others might too) is not strong enough to warrant everyone else changing their behavior pre-emptively.
Or a bird chirped in a tree, or whatever triggers hackers to loose their mind nowadays. Maybe some branches moved in the wind.
If your friends are using random apps, screw them. They'll find a way to get a hold of you if they care enough. Or you'll eventually figure out what the majority are using and cave.
I covered that with "It might be fine in certain contexts (e.g. team members..." and "it breaks down when you're communicating with arbitrary members of the public". A lot of the comments in this thread seem to be assuming that the only communications that ever take place are intra-company. For many people that isn't true at all. For me the vast majority of work-related communications are to clients and third parties. I can't just say "screw them" or "they'll find a way to get hold of me if they care enough" or tell them to use slack to inform me that they've emailed me. I have to live in the real world.
That’s what out-of-office automatic replies are for, which will include information on what business day you will be back, and often will also specify who is your substitute while you’re away.
It’s standard practice for B2B communication.
99% of incoming calls to my phone are spam. I won't pick up an unknown number unless someone has already contacted me and told me to be expecting a phone call, or it's a call from someone I already know (people I already know don't call me either).
That is to say, your mileage may vary on what counts as a "suitable medium".
Or maybe your agreement with your spouse is to communicate over instant message about managing these daily tasks, in which case it's ok, but you better crank that notification sound all the way to 11 LOL
My point is, there are types of messages which are highly time sensitive to the point where the response is meaningless past a certain point, and to many in this day and age instant messaging is the format for such inquiries to be made. Sure, one could be busy and be unable to respond, and one should be understanding of that. But it the reason why my spouse was unreachable was because they didn't bother responding to me at that moment to an obviously important time critical message we've got some problems in our relationship to figure out.
Ah yes, understood. That makes total sense. In fact I was thinking about a practical system that could be used to bypass silent modes and do not disturb configs for such emergencies. Back when MSN was a thing you had a buzz button that would play an alarm, vibrate the chat window and steal the window focus. It was as amusing as it was annoying, but there are practical uses for this.
If a bureaucracy sends out a thing that requires followup/action, and it arrives right before the sidewalks are rolled up, then the citizen is sort of flailing for days. Might even forget to act at 9am on Tuesday. Government websites include a lot of scheduled maintenance. Also, that letter they wrote will be dated at least 10 days before you received it. I carefully staple all correspondence to the envelope with postmarks.
If someone induces me to pay a bill 60-90 days early, that is my loss and their gain. Money in my bank is working for me, available, perhaps earning interest. Money in their bank is sunk. For this reason and others, it can be an error to pay your bills too early.
I recently ordered on Christmas Day from a catalog. They charged my card right away. They still haven't delivered some of the items. Vendors shouldn't be taking your payment until the stuff is shipped. Businesses won't pay invoices until the goods/services are received and verified!
As I said, bureaucracies run like clockwork, and they will always act at the right time and date. It will disadvantage the best of us.
Any office worker knows the difference in character between the email that arrived at 9am on Monday, vs. the memo sent at 11am on Wednesday, or the phone call coming in at 4:59pm on Friday...
And all of these things generally work fine with the assumption that response times will be a couple of days, plus the couple of days in transit.
I can’t say I recall ever encountering mail with a strict deadline very near to when I received it. (Usually the frustration is the opposite: I wish things could move a lot faster than they do.)
You do know that people also work in banks, right?
I'm saying there's a reason not all businesses (or government institutions) work 996[0].
White collars have the luxury of limited hours, resting on the weekends, and being able to take time off work when they have an appointment or obligation.
In my first real office job, I grew anxious when someone from down the hall came and conversed with my office-mate for ten minutes. We had all this work that needed to be addressed! I'm obviously acclimated to office culture now; I'm just trying to underscore the difference in work culture for those who may not have worked in physical labor environments. The people working those jobs aren't even an afterthought to many people (which I can attest from having dealt with people who mistreat workers).
banks are open Saturdays all over in the US. TD Banks are open on Sunday.
If it indeed is something that you feel might be fishy, I further recommend the following: write a summary of what was discussed and send your summary to the people on the call as "meeting minutes -- 2026-02-11" (make this a habit, and always say "I do this routinely to remember what was agreed"). This can easily avoid you being trapped by dubious propsals or being unwittingly on the wrong side of the law.
Are there legal or other situations in which meeting minutes would be admissible in evidence, but a recording would not be? Obviously this is jurisdiction dependent.
Who except you would know that you have any recordings? They are just used to help you remember. Remembering exactly what was said.
You might have had your reasoning warped by lawyerings in this case.
if you make a recording, transcribe it, the delete the recording, it's probably hard to prove you made a recording. better yet with todays technology you can probably make a transcription live. i don't know if feeding he audio into a transcription tool counts as recording.
but the example was to use a recording in court. if you do that then everyone knows.