Why She's Never Going To Respond To Your Emails

[Gingersnap]

Why She's Never Going To Respond To Your Emails
It's because "she" is your mom and her green-screened Nokia 5110 doesn't have email

By Joshua A. Krisch on Oct 07, 2015 at 12:57 PM

The age, gender and level of tech savvy of email recipients determines how quickly they’ll respond to your message, a new study finds. Despite being glued to short-form instant messaging platforms, Trigger-happy teens still love email, and are quickest to hit reply, taking just thirteen minutes on average to email back. Adults over fifty take three times as long to respond. Smartphone users are twice as fast as fogies who only check mail on their desktop computers, and women, generally, are slower to respond than men.

The findings may help predict when (or if) your love interest is finally going to return those messages, or how long you should wait before bugging a co-worker in person. Plug in the gender, age and technological capabilities of any email recipient, and the authors say they can predict whether you should expect a response immediately (within 15 minutes) quickly (within two hours) or slowly (more than three hours). The preliminary model isn’t perfect, but it can already take some of the uncertainty—and frustration—out of refreshing your inbox. Or you can, y’know, call the person and speak to them in real life.

In the future, the authors hope that their study will help make emails more efficient. “Patterns of email interactions reveal…the structure of evolving conversations,” they write. “Understanding how these patterns shape email use is necessary for designing the next generation of interaction tools that will improve the efficiency of communication.”

And email can use all the help it can get. People have been trying to kill email for years, and with communication platforms like Slack threatening to make it obsolete, clunky electronic mail could certainly benefit from an efficiency boost. Here’s hoping science, data and our e-idiosyncrasies still have time to save email.

At work I answered email pretty quickly because I had to do that. At home, not so much unless I'm waiting for a specific reply (not a can-we-do-lunch thing). I'll reply within a day if it's not a Sunday but if it was a real emergency, they would call.

I was at a mall this morning and I noticed the huge number of people craned over devices. I thought it was sad.



Vocativ

[scott]

Too many variables to reliably "predict" anything. I get anywhere between 100 and 500 emails in any day. Most are just informational, but usually 20-50 require some sort of response. I typically respond in the same day but never within minutes unless there is an ongoing issue requiring urgency.

That's quite different than some of my friends my age who spend all day on their computers and get 10-20 emails per day. They use it like chat or text messaging.

My kids almost never respond to email, they text.

[Celeste Chalfonte]

I have to respond fairly promptly, usually within a few hours, to work email. HRH and I mostly text, and if one of us has some to large or complicated to text, we'll either send a voice note or email it and text "Check your email." Otherwise, she rarely checks hers. I have a separate email account for newsletters and people whose emails can wait. I check that maybe once or twice a week.