Given that knowledge workers receive many more emails daily than they can possibly process, it is small wonder that some emails never get a response (the phenomenon called Online Silence, which I’ve discussed before). Indeed, the research shows that if a message isn’t replied to in a day or so, it is likely never to be answered.
There is, however, an interesting exception: messages that require an answer but also necessitate thought.
A great example are requests for LinkedIn endorsements (also known as recommendations). The way it works, in my experience, is this: Jack asks his LinkedIn contact, Jill, to provide a recommendation for him. Jill replies the next day “Glad to do it!”, but in fact does not do it that day, nor in the following week, nor, in some cases, in a month. Then, having completely forgotten about it, Jack has a nice surprise when a LinkedIn message announces that Jill has recommended him!
What is going on in this scenario is this: Jill does want to endorse Jack, since there is some degree of personal friendship between them (no one asks enemies to endorse them!). However, writing a recommendation requires some heavy mental lifting: you need to really think carefully what to write and how to phrase it to convey your exact intention. You need to clear some uninterrupted time to devote to the task, and in this age of the Soundbyte and the Blackberry this is a rare luxury indeed. So Jill puts the matter on her To Do list, but not at high urgency; this is a classic case of a task that is important but not urgent in her mind. Only after weeks have gone by does she decide to get it done, since letting it drop is not an option.
The same thing tends to happen to any email that is too important to ignore but too thought-consuming to do in one’s stride: emails whose processing involves reading long but valuable articles are another good example. Which is a shame, really, because in a sane world these thinking-related tasks would not be delayed for more than a couple of days; yet in our world we find it a real challenge to attend to them at all…
Great representation of how it happens in real life, I did tackle it in a way that I schedule each day of the week at least one hour to go through email and not have that time be swamped with meetings or any other things. That is just email time and I will reply to any email that I have in my inbox and if indeed more time is required, I make a task out of it and ensure that it gets done in due time.