In email communications with friends, it varies. I'll often let conversations hang for a while until there's something new to discuss.

-Donald Knuth

> It also puts a lot of pressure on me: what if I take more time than you to reply? Isn’t the whole point of asynchronous communication to be… asynchronous? Each on its own rhythm?

This one of those sentiments that makes me scratch my head. If this little thing makes you uncomfortable to the point that you need to write a blog post about it, how do you survive?

It is common courtesy, not a big deal.

When the main form of long distance communication was the postal system, and letters took days to travel from sender to receiver, you could easily wait days, if not weeks, to draft up your reply and mail it out. The recipient on the other end wouldn't even be able to discern the difference between your delay and the delay from the postal network itself. It had some in-built slack.

When the only phones were landlines, if someone called you and you knew you were in a bad mood, the kind of bad mood that would invariably make you say something stupid, you could just not pick up! There were plenty of common, understandable reasons someone wouldn't be available to answer their landline. Then they could leave you a message, and you could call back when you mood improved again. Again, there was slack built into the system.

Now there's this cultural expectation that puts far more attention on your reaction speed. A text message with no immediate response could just be them not seeing it immediately... But actually no! Now we have read receipts too! You can't even pretend to have not seen it yet while you think of your reply. Some platforms even have the little "currently typing" indicator tell them how long you've spent drafting and re-drafting whatever message you ended up sending. A panopticon of communication. Now there's no slack. Any person anywhere in the world could try and get a hold of you with the same expectation of immediacy that a face-to-face conversation would supply.

Now of course, not every single person I might text, call, or send an email to, will have the same expectations for what is an appropriate degree of responsiveness. But, (speaking from my personal experience) I am absolutely miserable at reading that from social clues. I am left having to assume that, in the absence of some clear indicator to the contrary, whoever I am writing to will actually have rather strict expectations, and that allowing myself to be lax may very well give them a terrible opinion of me. (Though, the degree to which their opinion of me actually matters is a different question entirely!)

I don't think many people in the real world worship the sanctity of the "Asynchronous Communication" principle above all else. Maybe the author is the 1/1000 that does.

Good, but like all good things, top posting is why we can't have good things.

It isn't going to stop.

For people who like to see waving three dots in iPhone chat, e-mailing makes them anxious. So I understand that apology is quite normal.

It is a sort of generational difference, imho.

I do like the idea of asking the sender to reply a few weeks/months later.

1. Quick email saying “acknowledge, will work on a reply with estimate target date”

2. Proper reply ideally by target.

Guilty as charged.

I don't understand why everyone below is discussing how a person treats his own personal emails.

It's largely irrelevant for any technical reason today, but the old greybeards still cling to it (I'm one of them).

I often have the experience that people apologize for being slow to respond to me. Whether they're on the phone, at a counter in person, or whatever. Sometimes they say "oh dear, this computer is so slow today!" or "please bear with me while I check this..." but many times it is a very pointed and pre-emptive statement that they cannot respond or comply with my request immediately, that it may take X number of hours or days or something.

I made a special request to a vendor last year, and the CSR said "oh gosh, we need to reach out to the manufacturer, in Europe, and you know how supply chains are these days... and..." and I literally said "no problem" and eventually, they did not even charge me for the item when it came in, months later. Likewise the dry cleaner always seems to protest that they cannot finish in time and can we please push back the deadline, but I feel like they are trying to shirk my business because they're overwhelmed, too.

And I've come to believe that this is mostly the result of me approaching with impatience and anxiety. I often reach a desk while breathless and make my requests more like demands with the utmost of urgency. I am not, in fact, that impatient, but I give that impression and people believe that I would be disappointed if they take too long. But I do tend to interrupt and distract people if they are trying to collect their thoughts, or figure something out.

My last supervisor used to do this all the time. Practically every email and every voicemail was followed up with apology for being slow. And I really think that he was very gently telling me not to be so impatient and anxious.

But also, there really is a business standard for prompt replies. If someone goes out-of-office, they are usually expected to put up an "OOO autoreply" that will tell you when they're returning. Because it really is business etiquette to respond promptly, or reset expectations by explain why you'll be late.

They feel guilty for not answering sooner and they are letting that known. It makes life beautiful.

Get over it. No one is doing it for your benefit. They're providing a secondary signal about their own workload. Just ignore it if you cannot make use of it.

If you are serious and down to business, taking into consideration the cultural bit over the efficiency or value of the relationship is backwards; apart from taking hints about manners and future expectations of communication with your correspondent.

The quantity of apologies I write in email replies is directly correlated to how overworked I am from existing in a reality where the existence of unproven tooling causes more work to be put on my plate without any realistic avenues to manage it. When everything is urgent, it can be impolite to be explicit about your priorities, but waiting to reply implicitly makes the point that something else was more important, and that is something which has political consequences, especially in business. Ultimately, like any element of etiquette, it's about smoothing over the rough edges so we can all get along and to assuage any feelings that the other person may have that they got stiffed.

I wish things worked the way the author thinks things work, and maybe it does in the world of academia or wherever this person is insulated from the consequences of late-stage capitalism and the gnat-like attention span that social media has inculcated into the global population. But in the business world, especially in the US, and especially in 2025 onward, there is an expectation that every individual person can do the job of a team of 6, and that responses need to be done with urgency to every missive. That's clearly an unrealistic and unfair expectation, but because all of us want to avoid being starving and homeless, we do our best to meet that expectation anyway, hence why burnout is epidemic and we all hate the current timeline.

Or at least make it funny.