Email Delay

I tend to flake out in responding to people. This is mostly true via email, but it's also true via Facebook, LinkedIn, and occasionally Twitter. A lot of this really isn't me intentionally trying to ignore folks, it just kinda slips my mind. Or more often than not, I think of a reply, begin to flesh it out, but then something distracts me.

What, you might ask? Any number of things. Maybe someone from my work team asked a question. Maybe I'm just checking on my phone while at a bus stop, and the bus is here now. Maybe it's yet another tweet, linked invite or face booking message. There are literally thousands of ways where something else demands my attention away from your important communication.

And then I never really return to that same place in my mind. Maybe I just totally forget about your message until I look at my inbox/tweet stream again. Maybe I look again and I just don't scroll far enough to see it. I've practically given up on tweets, but I still try and respond to all email. Well, most email. I do long to have a completely empty mailbox now and again.

But I digress. My point is that I forget to respond to something. And then time passes and I wonder if my response was really worth sending. Or I simply don't feel like responding at that instant.

Rinse, repeat.

This used to be OK, which is why I got into this habit. But now I keep pushing things off and never doing them. What changed?


When I was little, I remember wanting to show my dad something on my computer. I totally forget what it was, but it was really important to the 13-year-old brain of mine. It might have been something age-appropriately cute, like look at this website that I built with all the spinning gifs. More likely it was a problem installing a driver on our pirated version of Windows 2000.

I'd try to get him to come over, and my mom would simply reply, "Dad doesn't want to look at a computer right now. He's been looking at one all day."


I remember thinking it ridiculous at the time; how could you get tired of looking at a computer? I saw a computer for an hour or so of my schoolday when I had programming class, and then when I got home the computer stopped being a box of work and became a floating rectangle of color and entertainment. Even when I grew up and started having internships and real jobs I would still come home and spend a good amount of time on YouTube, Facebook, all the other ol' fashioned ways of wasting time on the internet, on a computer.

But somewhere along the line, that changed. When I come home now, I don't often go right to my computer. In fact, I rarely use my home computers at all as it is for just casual web browsing. I come home and have a whole different set of priorities. Cooking, reading, playing Ultimate, playing xbox 360, all of these realms of entertainment take me away from sitting at my computer being productive. Take me away from seeing all those personal emails that I really really should respond to. I just don't think to do it, because it feels like work compared to all the entertainment options available to me outside of work.

And then when I get to work, I think I should be productive, so I'm substantially more likely to push private message responses out into the "to do" pile. Then I only ever see it at work, so it never gets done.

So. Now I know what the problem is. Here's to hoping that knowing this, I actually start spending time responding to folks at work. :)