E-mail Addiction Follow-up

A few thoughts to follow up my entry about e-mail addiction – the reasons why I think e-mail addiction is so bad:

The obvious – e-mail addiction is a compulsion, and this is enough to drive you insane.

The less obvious – clients who receive extremely rapid e-mail responses from you will be conditioned to always expect this. This is problematic for 2 reasons:

1. in the event you are away from the computer or otherwise occupied, they will wonder what’s taking you so long to respond, as compared to your normal e-mail habits.

2. it makes you look like you’ve got nothing better to do all day but sit in front of your computer and answer e-mail. There’s an image problem there. When I get an e-mail now, I may wait to respond just so as to give the “I’m busy” impression – which is true anyway!

More importantly, experience has taught me that many situations need time to play out – being overly responsive can be damaging. Some angry or “situation” e-mails just need a day or two to die down a bit. It’s bad in many cases to be so reactive.

Like this article? Please share it.