Re: Email Response Time

Ever since stepping down from my Studio Director role at Tranquil Space a few months ago, I've noticed that my relationship with email has changed rather drastically. 

When I first began the transition process, I realized that I was addicted to email [No joke! Read all about it!], and that I was getting a lot of personal gratification from having a constantly full and refilling inbox. But, as my daily email load began to change--from one full of studio management emails to one full of art and blogging emails--my mentality about email has shifted.

In my role at the studio, I was responsible for getting back to every student or customer service email within 24 hours. This is an amazing policy for a business, and I think it makes a big difference, but somewhere along the way, this policy began to creep into my personal email belief system, how I felt I should handle every single email, and although I did not respond to every personal email within the same 24-hour block, I constantly felt the pressure to do so. 

Every time that I opened my inbox, I saw lines and lines of things to do and questions to answer, and in mind, I felt that they all needed to be done right this second (whether I did them right this second, or not). Thus, I began to be ruled by my inbox. In case there's any question in your mind, that's not a healthy way to live, but I think this phenomenon has crept into a lot of our lives--often without our realizing it, until it's second nature to be constantly anxious about our unanswered emails. 

Since stepping down from my management role and getting used to a less-intense inbox (we got a LOT of emails at Tranquil Space), I've started shifting my personal email response time expectations. I think the fact that I've been traveling a lot has helped, as has the fact that I'm now spending more time away from the computer, painting, but I've also just decided to cut myself some slack. 

Since I no longer have this 24-hour response time rule stuck in my mind, I've decided that it's okay to take my time responding. I know that this isn't the expectation in our culture, and it will cause (and has caused) some people to wonder why I haven't gotten back to them yet, but I hope that in taking my time to respond, I will give others permission to do the same.

So lately, I've been giving myself 1-5 days to respond, depending on the email. It's been great. Sure, there are still those emails that get pushed down in my inbox, "lost" in a way, and I forget about responding until I feel totally guilty about the weeks that have passed since it was received, but for the most part, I'm doing okay with this. I respond immediately to the emails that are urgent, which honestly, most aren't (they just feel like they are), and the others wait until I have the time and space to sit down and compose a thoughtful answer. 

I have one friend that I email with periodically, and we've made a rule that we won't ever apologize about the delay in sending a response. We know that we're both busy, and will get back to one another when we can, and speaking this understanding out loud has been amazingly freeing. When I receive an email from her, I don't have that same guilt bubbling up inside of me that I do with other emails, and I feel a little bit more relaxed about getting back to her.

That being said, here's what I want to invite you to do this week: Play with your email response times. Check-in with your email belief system, and see if there's something driving you to always be "on." Can you give yourself space to reply to an email? What happens if you don't respond right away? 

I know that there will always be work emails that need an immediate response, so I'm not talking about those, but I am talking about any and all emails that can wait--the full inbox that rules us, but shouldn't. 

Technology wasn't created to make our lives more stressful, it was created to make our lives better, easier, more efficient, but I believe that our relationship to our devices has made our lives much more anxiety-ridden than ever.

If you don't answer that text message until tomorrow, it will be fine. If you wait 6 hours to respond to a question via email, the world will continue to turn. If you take a week off of Facebook, or don't tweet for a few days, no one will get hurt. And honestly, you might feel much better. I know I do these days!

So, I hope you'll join me in tweaking your email response time. I think if we all implemented the "respond when you can" attitude, the world would be a little bit better place...