What if we just stopped being so available?
Parent Post
At first, being reachable
At first, being reachable all the time felt good.
Professionals who started using BlackBerries 20 years ago to conduct business on the go, registered as a superpower.
But as more people got mobile devices, responding to messages anytime became the norm among co-workers as well as friends and loved ones. The superpower morphed into an obligation.
But what’s changed in
But what’s changed in the past 10 to 20 years, with the mass adoption of email and smartphones, is that the “acceptable” window of response time has gotten much smaller.
Someone could conceivably apologize for their delay when responding in the afternoon to an email sent that morning.
Sorry for my delay”
Sorry for my delay” can be a way to signal that you care about your relationship with someone.
So perhaps we’d be better served by a phrase that says so more directly, like
- “So nice to hear from you!”
- “I always love getting messages from you”
- “I wanted to make sure I thought carefully about your good questions.”
All of these sorries
All of these sorries raise the question of whether any harm is actually done when someone commits the sin of unavailability.
There can be real consequences to responding slowly in a culture that considers idleness, or even just the appearance of it, to be a moral shortcoming.
Even if being responsive at all hours has no bearing on an employee’s actual productivity, many bosses lazily use it as a proxy for gauging workers’ value.
In everyday life, we
In everyday life, we may not be able to easily change others’ expectations of us.
We can stop taking slow replies personally. We can stop apologizing for our delays, in order to normalize non-speedy responses.
We can tell people there’s no need to apologize for their delay if they do.
Outside work, a delayed
Outside work, a delayed response can cause genuine problems too.
If your partner texts you “I love you,” responding two days later is not a good idea.
In personal communications, a lack of a speedy response risks signaling a lack of care. After all, your phone was right there.
The most common way
The most common way for people to resolve the tension between the pressure of speediness is to start messages with four words: Sorry for my delay.
Having multiple obligations and priorities means that we are, in a perpetual state of delay on something, and apologizing for that fact feels like having to apologize for your standard mode of being.