Everyday my inbox is bombarded with emails and if I am honest I probably bombard people with emails from me too. I am an email person and it is great because I can appear professional even though my beautiful toddler might be singing Twinkle Twinkle little star in the background. The sound doesn’t come through on the email, thank goodness, even though I do love her singing.

When you read your emails, which ones do you read first? It is the personalized ones from friends that I tend to open first. It is the same when we open our mail; we save the bills until the end and open the personalized ones first.

So that is reading the emails, but in what order do you respond to emails? I tend to respond to the emails that will take me only a few seconds to type a response. I then progress onto emails that might take a bit longer or require me to research something. The ones I leave until last are the non personalized emails and the ones where I need to respond in a way that might be perceived as unfavorable by the receiver.

Email isn’t that personal and I am sure we all have stories of being offended by an email that has been sent to you – one of the main reasons for this is you lose the tone of the person who sent the email – so you have no idea of their body language etc – so you perceive this in the email and as we know, our perception is wrong and we take the email the wrong way and it all starts to hit the fan. At this point the best thing to do before getting upset is to pick up the phone and talk with the sender.

So I recently sent an email to a friend asking for advice on a matter fairly dear to me and it has been over a week and I have had no response. It wasn’t really a thing that could come back with an unfavorable response – I just wanted an opinion.

I know in the corporate arena I would send emails and if I didn’t get an immediate response, the answer was no. If I was asking someone to do something for me and I got no response it was frustrating. Even if I followed up with a phone call asking for a response – it still didn’t make any difference.

Is it that we are so bombarded with emails that we forget common courtesy? Is it that we are so busy, we end up deleting the emails that are too much effort to respond to? I don’t know the answer – I guess all I do is remember that we are all humans and connecting in a personal way if I don’t get a response through email is my next step. It doesn’t always work and I don’t always connect with the person, but I certainly try.

I would love your opinions and input on why you think we don’t respond to emails? Please comment below: