The Email Pause

I've found, over the past decade, that email is my preferred method of communication. Consider for a moment all the advantages of email. For starters, you always get to converse on your own terms. People don't interrupt you and leave you with a thought unfinished because you're completely unable to. That fact alone probably makes email about five times more effective than verbal communication.

Email is also nice because you get to socialize with people on your own terms. If you feel that the conversation is drifting off into an area you find boring, annoying, or deals with something you would otherwise rather not discuss, you have the options of not replying at all or changing the subject completely. It is on the topic of conducting the conversation on your own terms that we happen upon a phenomenon I refer to as the email pause.

The length of the pause between your last reply and the next reply from the other person tells you just about as much as the text contained within the email itself. Let's say, for instance, that you send off an email to someone and two minutes later you get a reply. This is a virtually nonexistent pause, and would lead me to believe that the other person either has too much time on their hands, they can't let an email sit, or the subject you are discussing is fairly important to them. Of course if there are several emails sent back and forth with little to no pause in between, the conversation would probably flow better through a chat service.

The far more common experience with email is the delayed response. The length of the delay often fills you in on some details about the other person. A pause of a single day is pretty normal, and not really much of a pause. All it means is that they have a life, a job, school, or something else that occupies a normal amount of time, but they're interested in what you have to say. A delay of more than a day usually suggests that the other person is only marginally interested in either the conversation, or you.

I don't know how many times I've received emails from people, read the email, started a reply, and then ditched it because I really couldn't think of anything else to say to the person. They seem eager to talk, but I'm really not that eager. Instead I file the email in the back of my brain and let my subconscious work on it for a while. Eventually that creative part of the brain that I don't really control sends me a mental note that a proper response has been formulated, and I send off whatever pops into my mind. Such emails are usually brief, to the point, and all too often, responded to within minutes after sending, leading to the process repeating itself.

Then there are the ones where you send out an email, they sit for a week or two, you give up on hearing back from them, and then suddenly one day there's a response. I recently sent an email to an old friend of mine from highschool, and waited for a response. When none was forthcoming after three weeks, I gave up one it. Then one bright and sunny day I got up and much to my surprise and delight was a cheery email thanking me for thinking of them.

It's been three weeks. WTF???

Of course this person probably only checks their email once in a blue moon. It's either that, or when I sent it off, they looked at it, decided not to reply, then in a fit of self consciousness or pity, decided to reply anyway.

So suppose that you leave these large, pregnant pauses between emails, but the person you're conversing with always replies to you within the day, or worse, within the hour? Are they just desperate to be acknowledged by you? Do they have too much time on their hands? Of course the only thing more rude than blowing someone's email off is to email them back and ask them why they haven't responded.