You receive an email with a question asking for advice or a suggestion or an opinion. To give a full answer you would have to take some time to think. You are a little busy and you would rather not give it too much thought but there is a second consideration that leads you to give the quick and dirty answer right away. The longer you wait the longer they will know you thought about it and the more credence they will give your answer. Not to mention that more of your reputation will be at stake if you are assumed to have thought carefully.
Still, some issues are important enough to give thought to. But how much? The same tradeoff is there, but now the characteristics of the correspondent matter. Every additional second you spend thinking allows you to make a slightly more thoughtful answer but also increases what he expects of you. If he is very sharp, he will be read your reply and possibly see deeper into the question than you did making you look bad. The gap only gets bigger the longer you wait. If he is less sharp, every second tilts the balance in your favor.
All of this is predicated on him knowing just how much time you spent on the question. You want to manipulate this by establishing a reputation for rapid-fire responses. Then if you wait a day but still give a lousy answer, he will put it down to you just having been busy for day before giving your usual top-of-your-head reply. Indeed you want everyone to think you are busier than you are.
Then along comes instant messaging, facebook, etc speeding up communications. You are expected to have seen the message sooner so its harder to pretend you were unavoidably delayed. On the plus side though now you can more easily commit to being busy. Just friend everyone. Your feed is so cluttered up with babble that these really important questions credibly get lost in the shuffle. He can directly see how overloaded you are.
So the value of your marginal friend is equal to the incremental publicly observed distraction she creates.
Cheap Talk 
6 comments
Comments feed for this article
February 15, 2011 at 8:50 am
twicker
Interesting set of thoughts, and I don’t disagree with all the analysis, especially for those people who are consistently thinking more about the other person’s perceptions than they are about their own schedule.
However, I would suggest that, in my experience, most people think far more about their own schedule than they do about other people’s perceptions of their schedule, and thus they don’t think much about the signaling of the timing of the e-mail.
I’d say it has more to do with the length of the reply. For example, from the length of this reply, you can assume that I’ve put some thought into it (though not much, admittedly; I only had time to read your post** at about 9:30 AM EST, and it’s 9:34, so this is more off-the-top-of-my-head than anything). However, if I’d written,
“Great – go with this. Is this the next project?”
you’d assume that I hadn’t given it much thought (even if I didn’t reply until late tonight).
Again, from my experience, both inside and (mostly) outside academia, it’s the length that’s the tell, not the timing. With asynchronous communication, you can never know whether someone isn’t replying because they’re *thinking* about it, or because they’re so incredibly busy (writing that journal article draft (academia), prepping for the next meeting with the VC (outside), dealing with a family issue (either), etc.).
Given that you have no idea, I’d suspect that most people actually look at the quality of previous responses (because, in most cases, most people have previous responses to go by – no matter how much we in academia love to set up scenarios where people deal with each other in de novo situations). If previous response quality was high, then lack of response means the other person is busy, and even a long but not so good response may mean “busy, off the top of my head, feel free to critique.”
**Going back to that “only had time to read your post” — I’m going to tie that to your strategy of when to reply. I think your rapid-fire strategy can work (if I understood it correctly); however, rapid-fire, to me at least, also implies “short,” which also implies “not necessarily considered deeply.” I’d suggest that an equally good strategy would be to wait on most replies, even short ones; then, people (a) don’t expect a quick answer (almost none of yours are), and (b) aren’t surprised if your delayed answer isn’t as in-depth as they might like (those same delayed answers vary in quality, so they gain no extra information from the delay). It also sets you up so that you can sometimes surprise people with quick answers – and *especially* surprise them if the answer has some thought behind it (remember: *all* of those were previously delayed, so this one’s *really* special!). Even relatively mediocre, but rapid, responses suddenly look good (and the rapidity means that the receiver sees that you are *really* interested in them/in this idea, which buys you more forgiveness).
Lastly, I’ll point out that, with the advent of Facebook/Twitter/etc., there *is* an effect where you should probably *not* update things on those platforms as long as someone is waiting for your reply – especially if that “someone” is one of your Facebook friends/Twitter followers/etc. Doesn’t look especially good if someone needs something fast and your Facebook feed says, “Beautiful day – playing hooky and throwing the disc around!” 🙂
February 15, 2011 at 1:15 pm
dan
you already told us your blogging strategy. maybe you actually wrote this in your month of pre-blogging and have been refining it for 2 years 🙂
(btw, i wrote this immediately after reading your post)
February 15, 2011 at 4:47 pm
Steve
Honestly, I just think you’re being a little too neurotic about the quality of your responses. Don’t think too hard about this sort of thing unless you want to be paralyzed by the “earth-shattering ramifications.”
October 9, 2011 at 9:15 am
Light headed/ out of it from cold or head injury?
[…] a better answer? Share it below! Mouse here for Related LinksOff The Top of My Head Amazon.com […]
October 28, 2011 at 8:11 pm
Your Questions About When Do Hot Flashes End - buynaturalprogesterone.net
[…] WomenClomid and Hot Flashes — Fertility BlogHow To Take On That Hot Flash Symptom And Win!Off The Top of My Head var topsy_style = 'big'; var topsy_nick = 'heartratemonitor'; var topsy_order = […]
March 6, 2012 at 1:42 am
Obsessively Checking Email, Feel Free To Profit From This Idea « Cheap Talk
[…] is the superior form of communication as I have argued a few times before, but it can sure aggravate your self-control problems. I am here to help you with […]