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Email Response

Good to know what your email response time tells about you - even if you don't agree with the findings, it would make little difference if the vast majority of people did. For better or worse, you would be viewed and judged through this collective lens.

When it comes to email and work, I find my response time being inversely proportional to their distance from me in the food chain. The higher up they are, the quicker is my reaction with a couple of exceptions. A major snafu or a bellicose customer would usually take precedence. If there is a query with a binary or simple answer, I will respond right away no matter who it is from so I don't hold up whatever the other person is trying to get done.

It is generally believed (and even observed) that women are on the average better at multi-tasking than men are. So it should come as no surprise that they are able to respond to emails faster and also continue with their other tasks. It may not as the pundits are saying :

But such a swift response may have a downside - it may mean the sender is stressed or has low self-esteem, according to research.

Women, in particular, felt more pressure to respond quickly to a new email than men..

When it comes to personal mail, I will either respond with a day or two or chances are it will get drowned somewhere in my Inbox unresponded to for many months. I will think about writing that email every once in a while but not quite get to it. I figure everyone has a certain cadence to responding to their mail personal or official. They have their best and worst response times and for reasons that are idiosyncratic to their lives and personalities. In the end, there may be far more worthy subjects for research even if your area of interest is email.
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