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Showing posts from May, 2006

Email tip: Reply to all email messages within 24 hours

Do you ever get frustrated when someone does not reply to your messages within 24 hours? Isn't it fun to work with people who reply only after you've politely (but persistently) badgered them a few times? I can tell you that they only reply to two types of people: those whose cooperation they need in order to get their own job done, & those who badger them persistently enough to make them feel uncomfortable or embarrassingly inefficient. Now consistently reply to almost all of your emails within 24 hours. So how do you maintain responsiveness? In old way of doing things, to reply to a message, it was extremely tempting to leave it in the inbox as a reminder to reply. Creating an entry on task list saying "Reply to such-and-such message" seemed a bit ridiculous, to let these messages loiter around in inbox until you got around to answering them. (Or until they got tired of waiting & disappeared.) You know that your inbox used to clogged up with messages that yo