On Email Etiquette

Emails are a fantastic invention because they are quick, convenient, and straightforward.  In mere minutes you can contact someone about any topic and receive a reply just as quickly.  The problem arises with the true instantaneous nature of emails.  How soon should you be expecting a response?  Minutes?  Hours?  Days?

Image credit to shokunin on Open Clipart

Barring some sort of emergency, you should avoid waiting days to respond to an email.  But is it entirely reasonable to expect that a response should come within minutes of sending it?  I know plenty of people who send emails, or text messages, at three o’clock in the morning and are perturbed when they do not receive  a response right away.  Some people are up at three in the morning, but in general it seems as though those people are few and far between.  Is it entirely rational to expect a response when the person you’re contacting is likely otherwise indisposed?

Realistically, we should be praising the advent of email because it allows us to get correspondences out whenever we please without limitations on working days and hours of the postal service.  However, it is important to remember that while we can send our initial email at any time or on any date, our recipient also has the luxury of responding to us at any time or date.  Is three in the morning a convenient time for our recipient to be responding to their email?  Not necessarily.

As with cell phone etiquette, we need to exercise some caution in how we send out our emails.  In this case, the nine am to nine pm window is probably still the best time to send an email and expect a timely response.  However, since it does not pose as much of an interruption as a phone call, there is not necessarily a real limit on when an email can be sent.  The caution is here is that if getting a response is urgent, then it is appropriate to limit email correspondence to that nine am to nine pm time window; if not limited to this window, there is the caveat that the sender cannot be upset by a less than timely response.  On the other hand, if receiving a response is not urgent, then it does not seem like a time cap is necessary.

Emily Post offers these three considerations for sending emails:

1. Human contact still matters – Don’t communicate electronically at the expense of personal interaction.  There’s a reason people often need to discuss things face-to-face, and there are times when no substitute will do – whether you’re breaking up with your boyfriend or asking your boss for a raise.
2. Watch what you say, and how you say it – While the computer brings people together, its impersonal nature can lead to remarks that people wouldn’t think of saying in person.  Do whatever it takes to stay courteous, even in that means taping a note to your computer reminding you to be decent and polite.
3. Be careful when clicking Send – Whatever you say in cyberspace cannot be taken back.  You have no control over where your message goes once you’ve hit Send; it can be saved and forwarded by any recipient who chooses to do so, and words have come back to hurt people, destroy friendships, and ruin careers.

On Responding to an Invitation

It’s one of those days where you’re browsing Facebook at eleven o’clock at night and you see an event invitation from one of your friends.  It ends up being the same friend that always invites you (and the rest of his friend list) to concerts every few weeks because he decided to take up concert promoting for a hobby.  You might go, maybe, if you have nothing else to do–and that includes sleeping or catching up on Netflix.  However, you don’t want him to forget you the one time he invites you to a show you actually want to see.  So you hit maybe instead of not attending.

This is another aspect of our desire to avoid hurting people’s opinions about every little thing.  We want to seem open to the idea of attending whatever so we say we will go even when we have no real attention of attending.  And this is so ingrained into our response mechanisms that the invitation sender not only assumes that a maybe actually means no, but that a yes means maybe.  It is as though the creation of those three little buttons turned everyone into noncommittal attendees.  And this can backfire.

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My best friend got married last summer.  The morning of the ceremony, a few of her relatives called and said that they were actually in town and were wondering if they could come to the ceremony and the reception.  I was returning to her cabin with food when this happened and she gathered her mother and I for a conference.  “Should they be allowed to attend?”  “Did they respond to the invitation at all?”  “No.”  Her face resembled what I imagine chewing a lemon soaked in bitters would taste like.  “You want to say no, don’t you?”  She looked at her mother helplessly.

“They are family, it’s not a plated dinner, and we did order extra food.”

So her mother and I scrambled off to find extra chairs for the dining room and the ceremony.  We succeeded and everything was lovely, but the audacity of some people astounds me.

When did making a firm decision become taboo?  Is there really any person out there who will set a date on their own schedule and then proceed to be upset when it doesn’t end up fitting in with your schedule?  Probably not.  Consulting anyone else on their schedule, making a compromise, and then getting upset when the second person still doesn’t attend,  conversely, is fair and reasonable.  What is sad about this is that it began as a joke about behavior on Facebook and then seeped so much into our regular lives that suddenly people think it is alright to fail to respond to a wedding invitation and still attend.

Whenever I host events, I even tell my friends “It is okay if you can’t come and I’d rather you told me sooner if you can’t.”  But I shouldn’t have to add that caveat.  It is especially frustrating when they get defensive about whether or not they will attend and even saying “I just need a number for dinner reservations” never seems like a good enough reason to justify why you would need confirmed attendance.  And it’s not as though they actually need a reason.  They should want to respond in order to help the host(ess) in planning their event.

This is a call to everyone to start being more  exact in their RSVPs.  Out of respect for the people who throw events, we should be willing to say whether or not we are coming and leave the maybes for non-number specific events where we truly aren’t sure for a legitimate reason (i.e. not sure you have work yet).

 

On Cell Phone Usage

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment.  You go to dinner with your friends and you hear a sound from your cell phone.  Do you answer it?

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In our increasingly technological world, we are often consumed by technology because it is always at our fingertips.  Prior to the invention of the cell phone, we had to wait until we were near a landline to make calls or, in emergencies, we utilized change and pay phones.  I haven’t seen a pay phone in years!  And does anyone really carry change anymore?  I attended a dinner where everyone except me spent half the meal checking us into the restaurant on Facebook or instagramming pictures of their food.  Is the food still warm when they finish utilizing all their filters? Or, did they hear our waitress the first time she asked if they needed something—one of my friends realized she had no mayonnaise after twenty minutes of taking photographs.  We miss so much of the world around us when we spend all of our time plugged in to the digital world.  How can we combat that?  Some modes of transportation have rules about electronic usage during travel.  People will turn their phones off during flights.  Buses and trains have these same rules, yet I have heard many a conversation on a bus ride.  So even banning them does not necessarily work.  A certain amount of etiquette is lacking in these situations.  The key here is to be considerate of those around you.

Some of my friends have tried to circumvent this by playing a game.  Everyone goes out to dinner together and at the beginning of the meal each person gets five minutes to finish their phone usage.  Afterwards, each person places their phone face down in the center of the table.  The first person to pick their phone up pays the entire bill for whole table.  It’s a weird game of bribery.  If you can hold out on not using your phone, but someone else can’t, then your food is free!  This is insane to me because we chose to go out to eat together to enjoy each other’s company.  It shouldn’t be a chore or a bet to spend time with your friends.  Why do we feel the need to be connected to everyone else all the time anyway?  Especially when we are with other people.

Old etiquette rules existed about the times people were allowed to make phone calls.  No one could call before nine in the morning, no one could call after nine at night.  It was frowned upon to call during meal times because that was supposed to be time spent with the people around you.  In this increasingly digital age, we should bring those rules back and reverse them.  It should be up to each individual person to control their usage.  Make a vow to not take or make calls before or after a certain time and people will likely follow your lead at least with you.  Make it a point to not take calls during meal times or times when you are with other people.  Or, if you must take a call or be ready to take a call (i.e. if you are a doctor currently on call for a hospital), let those you are with know and then step away from the table to utilize your phone if needed.  If we collectively make the effort to show active consideration for others in our own phone usage (and encourage their consideration through our purposeful refusal of their incoming calls) then it is likely that we would no longer have the problems of watching our friends take pictures of their sandwich for twenty minutes when we’ve set up a lunch date.

Emily Post suggests these top ten phone etiquette rules:

1. Be in control of your phone, don’t let it control you!
2. Speak softly.
3. Be courteous to those you are with; turn off your phone if it will be interrupting a conversation or activity.
4. Watch your language, especially when others can overhear you.
5. Avoid talking about personal problems in a public place.
6. If it must be on and it could bother others, use the silent ring mode and move away to talk.
7. Don’t make calls in a library, theater, church, or from your table in a restaurant.
8. Don’t text during class or a meeting at your job.
9. Private info can be forwarded, so don’t text it.
10. NEVER drive and use your phone at the same time.