So, the logical person thinks: “My client asks me a non-urgent question, whether I respond in 5 minutes or 2 hours doesn’t make that much of a difference. After all, it’s not urgent and he knows I’m doing a lot. Of course, if it’s urgent I need to respond quickly.”
That thinking sounds like a perfect syllogism. Urgent things are urgent, non-urgent things are not urgent. So, if it’s not urgent, I can respond later, right?
Unfortunately, or perhaps, fortunately this isn’t quite right. The manager’s logic isn’t obvious to the non-manager and follows its own assumptions and thought processes.
The manager or your client—as I’m detailing in other pro-tips here—is hiring you to worry about something so he doesn’t have to and, as a consequence of your worry, solve the direct problem that causes the worry. Then you will work to prevent or minimize the risk of indirect problems (aka, other possible things to worry about.) If you don’t respond quickly, then that gives off the message that you’re not really worrying about it and that you’re not really on top of it.
Think about it this way: how long should you wait before you respond to a message? A great meta-strategy to answer such questions is to take Kant’s categorical imperative, simplified a bit, to its more extreme cases and compare those. If you hired someone and they responded to every email you sent [a] instantaneously or [b] 11 years later, which would you prefer? Obviously the first. This is an absurd case because you can’t respond instantaneously (I’m assuming you’re not AI reading this) and similarly you’d lose your job if you responded to all communication 11 years later, so the real answer is somewhere in between those two. But by comparing those two extremes, you see that you need to lean towards the faster, not slower side.
Implied in that example is another way to think about it: pretend you’re the manager or boss. You’d appreciate people getting back to you on your questions really quickly, even if they’re small. That’s clearly the kind of person everyone wants to work with. And nothing is stopping you from being that person.
The main challenge with this is psychological. It’s common, too common, for people to delay responding to even teeny-tiny mails because it’s a cognitive burden (albeit a minor cognitive burden) to just think about. So, you put it off and put it off.
The solution to that is to just redefine yourself as someone responsive. Easier said than done, of course, but the way you redefine something major is by starting with a small definition. Try it in a very small way, with one small client—and don’t even tell anyone. Just see how it goes.
