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This is entirely unrealistic and totally detached from reality. Someone like Travis Kalanick simply cannot reply to everyone who emails him. He literally wouldn
by vecter 4y ago
This is entirely unrealistic and totally detached from reality. Someone like Travis Kalanick simply cannot reply to everyone who emails him. He literally wouldn't have enough time to do that if he just replied to emails 24/7/365, along with the work associated with replying to those emails, which is often way more than the time to write a response.
The truth is, most people don't value your time because you don't deserve their time. I don't mean this in a judgmental way. It's a cold hard fact of reality. If I emailed Mark Cuban, the President of the United States, or Jeff Bezos and they didn't respond to me, that doesn't logically make them narcissistic assholes (they may or may not be, I don't know, but whether they are or aren't is entirely independent of their responsiveness to my cold outreach email). The fact that they didn't respond to my email doesn't make them assholes and it doesn't make me any less of a human being. There's no need to get emotional or moralistic about this.
Your suggestion to acknowledge the email is even worse, because they'd be dishonest by saying that they'd get back to you later. As I pointed out earlier, they literally do not have the time to respond to every email if they spent every minute of their lives doing so.
When it comes to trying to get in touch with someone whose attention is valuable, it's best to put your ego aside.
- tpoacher 4y agoContext is important here. The article starts by mentioning Travis Kalanick, but the quote itself appears in the context of it being presented as a general rule for handling email queues, and a good idea at that: > The moral here is the following: whenever you send an email to somebody (especially to somebody busy), imagine that this is what their inbox looks like. Unless you send a follow up, you’re not even trying. And they know it, so unless you follow up, they will probably just ignore you, correctly believing that you do not even want to talk to them so much. As Jennifer Doleac notes: I live by the rule that if it’s important, the sender will follow up. In that context, where the expectation is that you should reply (and you're not Jeff Bezos), then acting like this is simply being an asshole. You are explicitly saying "my time is more valuable than yours so I expect you to waste more of yours repeatedly until I decide to deign you with a response." Note I'm not even disputing the main point of the article, that it's your responsibility as the sender to follow up. That's actually good advice. But if you as the receiver, are systematically ignoring email because you expect people to email repeatedly until you feel like answering? That's not "efficient email practices". That's just being a dick on a power trip. In the context that you are emailing Jeff Bezos, of course, then naturally I agree with you: one sucks it up and accepts that realistically Jeff probably gets a million of these a day, probably going straight to spam, and chances are you're not gonna get a response and shouldn't take it personally.
- vecter 4y agoIt seems to me that the article is mostly talking about outreach to someone that you're trying to get in touch with, who has little or no official obligation to get back to you (barring the example w/the busy friend). If that's the case, and I'm the person asking for their time because they're providing value to me, then I think it makes complete sense that the onus is on me to try to get their attention. They are not assholes for ignoring someone that they have no obligation to respond to.