The Doctrine of Email Friday
If you’re like me, you worry about email too much: have I replied to all my important email? Did the person I sent an important email to notice it? Will they reply in time? Without clear social norms for how frequently we should reply to email, reply-time expectations feed into each other: we all expect everyone else expects us to reply promptly to every email. Consequently, many people expect an instantaneous response to any even mildly important email. Yet the vast majority of emails do not require a response inside a week, and no one but a superhuman could reply promptly to every last email they receive. Emails pile up and stress abounds.
What if we all agreed to do email just once a week? Say, on Friday? I hereby propose The Doctrine of Email Friday:
Adherents to The Doctrine of Email Friday pledge to only send or respond to emails on Fridays and no other day of the week.
Urgent communications should use channels more appropriate for rapid response, or in the worst case could be sent as email outside of Email Friday. A simple social contract to slow our hectic lives.
I have questions
Why Friday?
Friday is a good day for Email Day, because it means we can all handle our email at the end of the week and go into the weekend without anything hanging over our heads. It also conditions other people not to send you email on the weekend: an email sent on Saturday or Sunday will have to wait the maximal time — at least five or six days — for your response.
What if someone sends me an email outside of Email Friday?
There are two reasons you might receive an email outside of Email Friday:
- The email is urgent, and explicitly requests a response before Friday. This is a valid reason to send email outside of Email Friday, and may require you to reply prior to the next Friday. This is fine; you should reply and/or move the conversation to a more suitable rapid-response medium. See What if a communication is urgent? below.
- The sender is not an adherent of The Doctrine of Email Friday, and wantonly sprays email notifications across the land. On the one hand, since I just made this whole thing up, that shouldn’t be too surprising. On the other hand, how do you decrease the stress created by the unwanted intrusion of low-priority non-Friday emails? The first step is to address the hold the email has on your cognitive resources: immediately snooze the email (Gmail Outlook Thunderbird) to the next Friday on which you think you will be able to respond to it. Note that this may not be the closest Friday on the calendar; choose a Friday that you think you will have the time! This gets the email out of the way and out of your brain. Alternatively, you could schedule-send your response (G O T) for the next Friday. However, I don’t recommend this unless it takes very little time: the goal is to reduce non-Friday time spent thinking about emails. Finally, you could simply ignore it until Friday. In any case, you should condition your respondents not to expect unimportant emails to be replied to outside of Friday.
What if a communication is urgent?
Doubtless people will disagree on what constitutes an urgent communication. Fortunately, The Doctrine of Email Friday suggests an unambiguous definition:
A communication is urgent if it requires a response prior to the next Friday.
If a communication is not urgent by the above definition, it can be sent (or schedule-sent) on the next available Friday without issue. If it is urgent, then obviously it should be sent prior to the next Friday. It might be sent by email, but preference should be given to other channels that are better suited for rapid-response communication, such as Slack, text, phone, Twitter, Github, etc. If you cannot contact someone via these channels, a non-Friday urgent email is a suitable last resort. You may wish to indicate in the subject or near the top of the email that it is urgent, especially if you are sending to an adherent of The Doctrine.
How do I convince other people to adopt Email Friday?
How should I know? I suppose you could put a link to it in your email signature. If someone follows up with you about a non-urgent email that you haven’t replied to because it isn’t Friday yet, you could also politely explain Email Friday to them. But don’t be a dick about it.
