That made me think of a pre-emptive way to deal with our perennial email overload. When people are on vacation, they have an auto responder that gives people that information, so they won't be expecting a reply to their email immediately. Why not take that a step further and have an auto responder reply to all your email?
The auto responder would be sort of like your outgoing phone message. It would thank the writer for emailing and assure the writer that a reply would be forthcoming within 48 hours, 2 weeks, or whatever time frame seems do-able.
This technique just buys a little time, but it would lessen email stress for the recipient, and let the sender know that her email hasn't, and won't, be ignored. I haven't tried this yet (because I just thought of it!); if you have, let me know.
I already do this -- but not by autoresponder. It's simply good email etiquette to let people know that you read their email & will respond within a given time period (if you aren't going to respond within a few hours).
However, it's not possible to automate my responses; my email is too varied for a single time frame to be reasonable. If I had to do this frequently, I'd probably set up some templated responses. But I wouldn't automate it.
On the other side, if I receive an automated response, I'd feel that it's essentially worthless because an automated response means the recipient didn't read the email. Thus, if it it's important, I'll have to follow up -- either with more email or an even more disruptive method. That puts the burden back on me, which I find irritating.
(It's almost as bad as those emails and voice mails which simply say "call me".)
In the end, an automated response doesn't save any time because you still have to go through all the email and decide what to do. Better to handle it appropriately when it comes in. Then you know what explosions are waiting in your email & what you can safely ignore for a few days.
Posted by: Margaret | August 8, 2006 11:44 AM | Permalink to Comment