Replying Quickly

As professionals, we should not need to remind our colleagues to follow-up on requests that we have sent to them either via email or otherwise. As much as possible, we should reply to emails as soon as possible and if a quick reply is not possible, then the least we can do is to send an email reply stating that it may take a while to fulfil the request.

I heard of a really sad anecdote from a friend: there was this Government/Temasek-Linked Company (which will remain unnamed) where Person A actually sent an email praising Person B for constantly harassing Person A’s team members to get things done. What takes the cake is that this email was actually copied to everyone involved in the project (total of about 20-30 people)! I think that was a seriously disturbing case of organisational dysfunction and nothing to be proud about. My personal opinion is that Person A requires self-reflection…

In short, the Bible puts it succintly: Do unto others what you want others to do unto you.

2 thoughts on “Replying Quickly”

  1. Agree. This approach also generate a lot of emails spamming people’s inbox and wasting ppl time to read.

    How can someone effectively reply to 1000+ emails per day? He will be busy answering emails instead of doing work. Sometimes a phone call will be better when a quick response is needed. I feel emails are being misused at times.

    An issue/task tracker will be better. There will be a reminder if tasks are overdue. If team A’s members always dilly dally, the bottleneck can be identified based on the trends. If team B always give unreasonable deadlines, it will also be clear.

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