More than likely, you've been in one or more of these similar scenarios: you've sent an email to A) a coworker about a project with a near and looming deadline; B) a landlord about a leak in the ceiling that is progressing from a trickle to a deluge; C) an ex about whatever made emailing him or her seem like a good idea in the first place.
Now, you've come across an inevitable waiting period, and it's driving you closer and closer to somewhere in between watching the clock and scratching at the walls. What's taking so long? What will the response be? According to a new study, there might be certain factors that can determine both response time and tone — all of which are affected by factors like age, message volume and the messaging platform itself.
Conducted by the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Computer Science Department and USC Information Sciences Institute in collaboration with Yahoo Labs, the study attempted to measure time and tone response in a behavioral context, with a pool of volunteer test subjects who allowed to have their inboxes (read: incoming email) reviewed. As per a press release issued detailing the recorded findings — published under the title "Evolutions of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload" and presented at the World Wide Web Conference — the names of the account holders were unidentified and the contents of their emails were unread in consonance with privacy standards.
From the mountain of data the researchers accrued, they determined that 90 percent of email recipients responded somewhere between under 24 to 48 hours to messages they received (unless, that is, they somehow found their way into a spam folder). Of course, this particular set of results only applied to those who were intent on responding — so if that's not the case, the sender might be out of luck if they're waiting for a timely (or general) response.
The team also discovered that age plays a huge part when it comes to getting a sometimes elusive reply — and that the younger the recipient, the more likely it was to encounter a faster answer by email. Teens averaged in at 13 minutes, with adults between the ages of 20 to 35 at 16 minutes and those between 35 and 50 years at 24 minutes. As for the older set? Those who clocked in at over 51 years of age tended to have a garden variety response time of 47 minutes (which might also have something to do with varying levels of tech-savvy and familiarity or unfamiliarity with a number of messaging platforms).
Surprisingly, those self-same platforms also largely affected how long it took a message recipient to come back with a return reply; people who responded via cell phone took half the time as someone using a laptop.
As for tone, the real nail-biter? A curt or laconic response might have nothing to do with the content of the original message: five-worded emails tended to be the most common form of reply, and only 30 percent of the collected emails contained over 100 words in answer-form.
A few helpful tips the researchers also garnered from the study: higher email volume tends to have a direct affect on response length, due to the overwhelming nature of a rapidly growing inbox (i.e., shorter replies diminish the load at a quicker rate), and younger users tend to handle volume better than older ones; accordingly, if the account holder finds that he or she can't keep up with the piling volume of messages, they usually switch to a kind of priority mode, picking and choosing which to respond to. It's also better to send something out during the day than at night — like most organisms, email responding operates on a "circadian rhythm." So, maybe you won't be able to predict exactly when that landlord, coworker or ex will get back to you, but at least you'll have a better chance of getting an answer if you hit send bright and early. All in all, don't worry; most of the time, it seems that it's not about you, it's them.
Via: EurekAlert
Photo: Tea Latumahina | Flickr
