Delphic Maxim 98: Give a timely response
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
98. Give a timely response
There’s a flip-side to restraining your tongue, which I kind of alluded to when I wrote that post, and that’s giving a timely response. Back when I was writing about that maxim, I reminisced about working in an electoral office, and the advice I got to hold off on replying to cranky emails for at least 24 hours. This gives both sender and receiver time to cool down: particularly because electronic communication seems to have dulled our ability to be courteous (or at least, to keep our temper).
But it’s still necessary to send a timely response — you can delay things for a day, but much further than that and you’re getting rude. Actually, I find email etiquette fascinating, because people have such varied interpretations of it — no doubt because it’s only relatively recent. The agonising about when you should send an email, the degree to which it will disturb someone, and what constitutes too late to reply are such modern concerns (nobody ever felt that way about sending a letter, probably because it was so instant).
Which kind of leads me to another thought: how has the acceleration of communications changed what we regard as a ‘timely’ response?
In ancient times, a timely response could have taken anywhere from days to months. Messages didn’t travel as quickly as they do today — but the nature of the response would have been more valuable. Responses are both timely, and considered.
Contrast that with the age of email, and particularly of social media, where responses are nearly instant (or notifications urge us to make them instant), and almost never as carefully considered as they need to be. Anthropologist David Graeber writes in Utopia of Rules about the proliferation of paperwork and bureaucracy — we’re drowned in ‘busywork’ that doesn’t actually seem to achieve anything meaningful. Email is a big part of that — we often send absurd and meaningless emails simply to create the illusion that things are being achieved.
Even our personal communications, outside of the heavily bureaucratised workplace, are now enslaved by the new ‘timely’. Facebook messages is famous for the ‘seen’ prompt — when someone can tell if we’ve read their message. Even without notifications, this starts the clock of timeliness running: somebody knows we have read their message, and now we need to decide when to reply, if we’re going to reply, what length of time is inappropriate before a reply.
A timely response doesn’t just come down to the expectations of the receiver, and this fact is something that has been lost. The pressure that comes with electronic media — with read receipts — is that a degree of control over our own time has been lost. We might want to draft a slower, considered, more meaningful response, and that takes more time. We might not think that something is worthy of a response at all (maybe we have nothing to add). But the insistent pressure of ‘seen’ bears down on our social conscience — we run from it, but it sits there all the same: “this message has been seen, and they haven’t responded”.
I don’t have read receipts switched on my phone, because I don’t want the pressure to reply. I also don’t have notifications switched on for Facebook messages, because I want to control the tempo with which information gets pushed in my face. That doesn’t exempt me from the need to give timely responses — I’m as bad at the next person for getting back to people quickly. But it does set a standard, and slows things down.
A lot of modern life is now about ‘expectations management’. Our technology, our connectedness, and our unbelievable wealth means that we can technically do things faster and more efficiently than ever before. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should — I think there are a lot of quality compromises that come from that kind of speed.
So while a timely response is a good thing — it’s up to each of us to negotiate the expectations about what constitutes ‘timely’. And I think we could all benefit from stretching those timelines out a bit: give us more time to think before we act.
