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Waiting on
an email? Why it takes some people SO long to respond
Oct. 8, 2015 at 4:32 PM
Meghan Holohan
TODAY
It could simply be a generational
difference. A recent study finds that email response time
varies greatly by age and the older a person is, the fewer emails she will
answer.
"Different people are able to
cope with information load, email load [differently]," says Kristina
Lerman, a project leader at the Information Science Institute at the USC
Viterbi School of Engineering and an author of the study. "We do have
evidence that people have finite capacity to process information."
The researchers looked at 16 billion
emails exchanged by two million users over several months to see how long
people took to reply and the length of response. The study finds:
If people are going to respond to an
email, 90 percent will do it within a few days.
·
Half fire off a response in under an
hour.
·
Teens reply the fastest, shooting
back a response in 13 minutes, on average.
·
People aged 20-35 are almost as
speedy, sending a reply in 16 minutes, on average.
·
It takes people, ages 35-50, about
24 minutes to reply.
·
People age 51 and older take a
whopping 47 minutes to reply to their emails, on average.
·
Women take about four minutes longer
than men to send a reply.
·
The most common responses contain
five words.
·
More than half of the responses
contain fewer than 43 words.
·
Only 30 percent of emails exceed 100
words.
·
Responses on the weekends are the
shortest.
·
Want a lengthy reply? Make sure your
email arrives in the morning.
Younger people respond to the most
emails, but with the fewest words. Older people respond to the same number of
emails no matter how many they receive. If they respond to 50 on a day when
they receive 50, they'll respond to 50 on a day when they receive 200, says
Lerman.
Why don't they answer?
The problem with email lags? Waiting
for a response feels torturous.
It's because we're social and view
email as a way to connect.
"We expect someone to
acknowledge us," says Pamela Rutledge, direct of the Media Psychology
Research Center, who was not involved in the study. "There's a
lot of social anxiety that comes along with [no email responses] because no one
wants to be disrespected or no one wants to be ignored."
Rutledge says that the study points
out patterns, but does not explain why a difference exists between older and
younger users. She cautions people from reading the results as negative. It's not
bad that younger users send short responses, just like it isn't negative that
older users send lengthy responses.
"Understand in this new world
short [or long] does not have an implicit value judgment," she says.
"There is a misunderstanding that technology gets in the way of
relationships. I think that it facilitates it."
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