The secret to success? Get through all your emails

Weall know how it goes. A work email is sent – a request for a meeting, or a simple suggestion of some kind. Rather than the agreeable ping of a timely response, comes a day of silence. And then another. And another. You send a follow-up message and the same thing happens.

Usually, it’s not clear why contact has been suspended. During the pandemic, it was important to show understanding in these situations: a non-response was often to do with your correspondent falling ill, or suffering the loss of a family member.

But such instances can be vexing, though nothing can be gained from confronting the problem. In many cases, the relationship in question languishes, perhaps to be picked up tentatively at some later point. Often it lapses altogether.

Part of the problem is that in our society it has become acceptable not to respond. On WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook – sites which are increasingly used for work-related communications – we can often see ‘read receipts’ showing when someone read our message, and therefore gauge the extent of that person’s rudeness for not replying.

But the fact that this is now usual practice, shows that we have forgotten that it is indeed unacceptable to fail to issue a response. If someone says something to us in the street, it would be unthinkable in most cases not to say something, even if the person speaking were a stranger. If we did the same to a