I'll get back to you

I haven't checked my email lately. And by "lately", I mean roughly 12 hours. I feel a dual pull: the desire to put off other important work by checking my email, i.e. the desire for immediately gratifying distracting novelty stimuli, and the worry that I may be missing something important, i.e. the desire to be responsible. To neglect one's email is to deprive both one's short-term and long-term desires. That's how I feel, but how do the people on the other end of those emails waiting in my inbox feel? How long do you have to wait to be considered neglectful?

Email, like texting, is an asynchronous form of communication. With any asynchronous form of communication, there is no obvious answer to the question above. These two ways of communicating have vastly different norms as to how long one can wait to reply without seeming rude. In fact, I would argue that email does not really have a norm, and that lack of a norm may cause some animosity toward the person with whom the email user is communicating as well as animosity toward the medium of email.

Thinking about how long is an acceptable gap between message-received and message-reply prompts me to think about the power dynamic between the sender and the receiver. One may always hide behind the fig leaf of busyness ("sorry I didn't return your email sooner. I've been totally swamped!"), and certainly some emails take longer to reply to than others. Some require that you look up other information or do some work in order to craft an acceptable reply, and this may take time. In some cases (as in mine right now), the receivers may not be aware that he/she received any message, and thus can plead ignorance (for about 12 hours or so, right?). But in many cases, the receiver prioritizes. All other things be equal, the receiver puts the sender somewhere in a hierarchy. They can afford to put off answering a co-worker but not the boss, a brother but not a wife, etc. To be upset about not being replied to sooner is, sometimes, to be upset at one's place in another's social hierarchy. Because email is asynchronous and it lacks the norms about time-to-reply than texting has, it is ideal for exposing these hierarchies.

One interesting solution to this problem might be to develop a thorough email policy: you're guaranteed a reply within one week, barring vacation or illness. You get a reply in 48 hours (excluding vacations and illnesses) if the reply requires less than 5 minutes of work. Within work hours, you can expect a reply in 4 hours if the reply requires less than 5 minutes of work. If the reply requires more work, the amount of estimated time of work in minutes = the required reply time in hours (20 minutes of work = 20 hours to reply). No exceptions, regardless of whether you're my boss's boss's boss or my intern.

I'm sure people would think you're pretty weird for setting these rules, but norms have to start somewhere.