I get this a lot:
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly!
Thanks for replying so fast.
Thank you for your prompt reply.
I take special care about responding to people, regardless of the medium of communication. If you text me, I'll text back right away. Email? Minutes. Voicemail...well I'm getting better at that. But when I know someone has contacted me for any reason, I respond quickly. Why?
Because people appreciate it.
Read MoreIf email were a plague, surely the human race would be long gone by now. Email is the arch-enemy to productivity, focus and peace. It's by no means the fault of those sending these emails, as I'm sure they're relatively important or job-related. But the sheer number of emails most people receive can be harrowing.
I had recently gotten to a place where it became impossible to finish a single task in one sitting. Constantly being interrupted by single emails would break concentration. In addition, if the email was requesting something I could finish quickly, I would stop my current task to address the simple request and move it out of my inbox. This brought some satisfaction as I was completing a task, but the main project or time-sensitive task would suffer from small lapses in productivity.
Read MoreI literally receive 100s of emails per day; and I say that not to boast. Meeting requests, forwards, Reply-alls, and the messages I actually need to interact with; all these emails flood my inbox and vie for attention. But there are two factors that make dealing with email even more difficult; length of a message and a lack of clarity. If your email is longer than this blog post, it's not going to be read in depth. I'll skim it and look for important facts, which may result in missing the actual point of the message. Also, an email may be short but unclear, making it difficult to take action and complete the request.
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