Day 362: Unanswered Messages

personal

Some days, like today, I barely use my computer. (This has only started happening since I started having a social life again after moving to Taipei — for most of this year, I spent most of my waking hours on my laptop.)

And since I try to minimize the use of my phone, that means that the only messages I look at and respond to are related to the day’s logistics like meeting up.

Even when I don’t look at my inboxes, I know people are emailing me, messaging me, sending product feedback, and trying to get in touch.

I don’t have a good way of handling all the inbound communication, which means that messages often go days, weeks, and even months without being answered. I still have emails in my inbox from half a year ago that I’ve been meaning to respond to.

There are two problems here:

  1. People have no idea why I haven’t responded

    • Even if I’m offline for a while (e.g. meditation retreat) and haven’t seen their message or I want to respond but simply lack the organization to do so, most people probably assume that I’ve read their message and simply am not interested in replying. I don’t want people to feel ignored.

  2. I need a better way to respond to all messages in a somewhat reasonable timeframe

    • Unless I’m completely offline for a while, people shouldn’t have to wait longer than like a week to hear back.

Maybe it’d help to have a public status page that indicates how many unread emails / messages I have with an estimation for the time that I’d reply to new messages so that people can adjust their expectations. I think it’d help to even put that while I read every message, I might not respond at all given how much difficulty I have dealing with the volume.

Should I aim to respond to every message? Email is a bit strange in that anyone can make a claim on your time and attention simply by knowing the characters that form your email address. It’s a TODO list populated by anyone on the Internet.

Perhaps I should just accept that I can’t respond to everyone, make it clear that this is the case wherever my email address is listed, and let people know that while I appreciate messages, I have a hard time responding to every single one.

When I made videos on Facebook, I received hundreds of messages and tried my best to answer all of them, but that meant spending hours simply replying to people. I don’t want to spend my time and attention that way (see: all the posts I’ve written about strongly preferring in-person interactions over digital ones) so I think this makes sense for me.

(Note: I’m only talking about messages from people I don’t know on the Internet — for messages from friends, I intend to answer all messages and need to come up with a way to prevent messages from falling through the cracks and going unanswered.)