Practicalmadness

Let me ask you something, internets: how long is “too long” for an un-replied-to, un-acknowledged e-mail message to sit in one’s inbox? When I started thinking about this issue sometime last week, it was solely in a business context. But as I may have mentioned in this space I’ve been messing around with online dating. And about 10 days ago I got a flirty message from an interesting girl, and per my usual practice I wrote her back immediately. The girl didn’t respond at all since then, so last night I sent a follow-up message in which I acknowledged the possibility that maybe my first message was simply a turn-off. Well, this morning she finally responds, but only to make two points:

1. She’s been really busy, which excuses any delay on her end.

2. I e-mailed her pretty recently, the implication being that I shouldn’t be so impatient as to expect her to respond in less than ten days.

There was no apology (or if there was it was pretty fucking implicit), no attempt to maintain a flirty tone — it was actually a pretty dry “get off my back!” kind of e-mail. Needless to say, it was a little bit of a turn-off.

But my point in telling this story is not (I swear) to bitch about some girl rejecting me or failing to live up to my standards of e-mail etiquette. Rather, I’m trying to illustrate something I’ve come to refer to as my “Theory of Relativity,” which is quite simply this: the busier you think you are, the lazier you appear to an outside observer.

I’m a big fan of Josh Kamler and Axel Albin’s blog Tiny Gigantic, and last May Josh wrote a post called “Busy-ness is blindness” in which he drew a really super-useful distinction between “busy” the mental state, and actually being busy:

I’ve got a friend who, when I ask him how he’s doing, invariably answers this way: Dude. Soooo busyyyy. And he says it sort of breathlessly, drawing the last word out into a kind of falsetto. But when I ask him what’s got him so busy, the answer doesn’t vary much either: Oh man. All kinds of crazy shit.

Thing is, that doesn’t mean anything. If I press, it’s mostly work, family, and personal obligations—the usual stuff that fills up most everyone’s day.

Now, if the person who is sooooo busyyy is just an acquaintance or a friend you’re not depending on for anything — i.e., not someone you’re waiting on to help plan a surprise party or move a couch — then it’s no big deal. The relativity theory comes into play when you (a) are waiting on a response/action from the other person, (b) have a reasonable expectation of when to expect said response, and either (c) don’t yet know the person well enough to have a feel for when they return e-mails or (d) have been burned by them in the past and know that they’re not going to get back to you in time.

Here’s the thing about busy-ness: we’ve all been there, and in talking about friends, clients and anonymous internet girls’ falling back on the sooo busyyy excuse I really don’t mean to imply that I haven’t done the exact same thing myself. When you’re sooo busyyy, you’re in survival mode, where you’re just trying to stay afloat and deferring any task or obligation — like returning an e-mail or phone message — that might keep your head below water a second longer than necessary.

This isn’t the same thing as being in crunch mode; that has a limited scope, and besides, it usually comes off so much better when you can give people a specific reason why you back-burnered them. Busy-ness is special because it’s open-ended and amorphous. You’re not ignoring people in favor of some specific, more important thing. That can still sting, but at least it’s a reason. Busy-ness says you’re ignoring me because everything is more important than me, our relationship, our project, etc.

And that’s where the perception of laziness comes in. After all, what is laziness but simply another word for wasting one’s energies on bullshit?

I have a client who’s been frantically pushing me to finish their project as soon as possible, and I’ve been trying to accommodate them. But when I e-mail or call this guy to get a sign-off or ask a question, he’s never around. On a good day, I get a response within 8 hours. But more often, I’ll get an incomplete answer late the following day, prompting me to send a follow-up e-mail which in turn will start another 36 hours of wheel-spinning.

This client’s frantic about the project we’re doing together, but they also have at least two other major web projects plus a separate core business. I know in the back of my mind that the reason he finds it hard to stay engaged with our project is because he is (sing it with me now) just sooo busyyy, and I try to empathize with that.

But from my perspective, it doesn’t matter whether his time is being sucked away by business or by Rock Band — he simply is never there when I need him to be, which makes me want to think twice before putting myself in a position to need anything from him. In other words, it makes me think twice about continuing to do business with the guy, even though we’ve made a bunch of money together.

It’s like having a friend who screens your phone calls but never hesitates to call you if they need something. The total silence in between times they come begging speaks volumes about how highly they value the relationship. The client or friend or random stranger in question surely doesn’t think they’ve done anything to offend you, and would be surprised if you called them on it. Which is exactly the point: when you’re trying to focus on everything, you’re focusing on nothing, which is a big problem if you’ve got people depending on you for things.

What elevates this above mere annoyance is the fact that we’re talking about e-mails here, or phone calls or IMs. All it would take to fight the perception that they’re slacking is for the offender to just send you a quick ping, saying that they haven’t forgotten you.