Email Apples and Oranges
by Miki Saxon
Last Friday Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist professor at Wharton and columnist for the New York Times, wrote a column saying that not responding to email was rude.
I’m really sorry I didn’t say hi, make eye contact or acknowledge your presence in any way when you waved to me in the hallway the other day. It’s nothing personal. I just have too many people trying to greet me these days, and I can’t respond to everyone.
That sounds ridiculous, right? You would never snub a colleague trying to strike up a conversation. Yet when you ignore a personal email, that’s exactly what you’ve done: digital snubbery.
Two days later Mark Suster, a partner at Upfront Ventures, penned a 1600 word response on Medium saying he thought it was really dumb.
That people just got too much email, his examples?
Do you think that the CEO of Google should answer every written letter he receives? Should Jeff Bezos be required to address every written complaint that shows up in Seattle or Satya Nadella at Microsoft?
He goes on lumping every social media platform request together with email and how it’s impossible to respond to them all.
Grant’s post specifies colleagues and makes no reference to social media requests.
I also doubt that Suster’s examples are the folks Grant had in mind.
The great majority of workers don’t keep schedules the likes of Bezos, Page or Nadella nor do they carry the same responsibilities, so it’s actually a pretty dumb comparison.
But Suster has a big following in the tech world and I’m sure there are thousands of techies who will happily latch on to his words as justification to continue ignoring emails.
Image credit: matthewreid
