In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours. If I get blown off, or if somebody takes 4 days to respond to my email, my impression is always that my counterparty views the matter as unimportant. For my part, if I reply late, and if the matter is genuinely important, I think it's proper and fitting to include a brief note of apology.
In email communications with friends, it varies. I'll often let conversations hang for a while until there's something new to discuss.
> In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours.
Different stroke for different folks, but I'm still very much in the paradigm where email is more like a letter in the mail, not like a text message, IM, or "please return my call" voicemail. [0]
Of course I recognize that email is often used for time-sensitive matters (like scheduling events), but any time I see an email that is likely to require multiple timely backs-and-forths I'll try to move the conversation to a more suitable medium.
[0] Here I'm referring to solicited emails sent by humans or transactional emails triggered directly by a human interaction. In practice our email inboxes also serve as a general "notifications hub" for all sorts of things including recurring events ("remember to pay your bill") and, of course, unsolicited junk.
> Different stroke for different folks, but I'm still very much in the paradigm where email is more like a letter in the mail, not like a text message, IM, or "please return my call" voicemail.
I moved from a company that operated under that paradigm (Slack was the primary mode of internal comms) to one that treats email as the primary mode of comms. It was a minor challenge to start watching my inbox and keep it at zero-unread (something I don't care about at all in my personal emails). Feels natural to me now when I'm in work-mode.
Have you routinely received letters or bills from bureaucrats?
I can tell you that those banks, government agencies, and hospitals know how to backdate letters, postmark them like clockwork, and land in my mailbox on a Friday at close of business on a 3-day weekend, just to jam us up and narrow any deadline that may exist.
Even a hand-delivered notice from the landlady shows up at 6:01pm when the office is already closed. I guarantee that you will be helpless to respond in a timely fashion.
It has been suggested that "bankers hours" and 9-5 office hours were originated specifically to jam up the working man, who needed to be in the mines or on the factory floor during those hours. If a bank actually wanted to serve working people, they would be open on weekends. Traditionally it was not something your wife or kids could proxy, if they did not drive or have authorization, but the single working man was doubly screwed in these situations.
This year I also have the experience of very premature "billing notices" sent to my email and text and every other place, where the bureaucrats are counting on impatience to pay a bill far too early, before it is due, luring you in with ambiguous wording. People today are warning "do not comply in advance" and I am observing this maxim with health care billing in particular.
If a bureaucracy sends out a thing that requires followup/action, and it arrives right before the sidewalks are rolled up, then the citizen is sort of flailing for days. Might even forget to act at 9am on Tuesday. Government websites include a lot of scheduled maintenance. Also, that letter they wrote will be dated at least 10 days before you received it. I carefully staple all correspondence to the envelope with postmarks.
If someone induces me to pay a bill 60-90 days early, that is my loss and their gain. Money in my bank is working for me, available, perhaps earning interest. Money in their bank is sunk. For this reason and others, it can be an error to pay your bills too early.
I recently ordered on Christmas Day from a catalog. They charged my card right away. They still haven't delivered some of the items. Vendors shouldn't be taking your payment until the stuff is shipped. Businesses won't pay invoices until the goods/services are received and verified!
As I said, bureaucracies run like clockwork, and they will always act at the right time and date. It will disadvantage the best of us.
Any office worker knows the difference in character between the email that arrived at 9am on Monday, vs. the memo sent at 11am on Wednesday, or the phone call coming in at 4:59pm on Friday...
I’ve gotten the normal stuff via mail: bills, credit card stuff, DMV, the occasional jury summons. And I’ve also dealt extensively with U.S. immigration, which often requires numerous exchanges via USPS.
And all of these things generally work fine with the assumption that response times will be a couple of days, plus the couple of days in transit.
I can’t say I recall ever encountering mail with a strict deadline very near to when I received it. (Usually the frustration is the opposite: I wish things could move a lot faster than they do.)
Are you trying to say that banks can't be open on the weekends because then bank employees would have to work weekends? Much like any business that operates on the weekends? They would have time off during the week and wouldn't have the issue that people working Mon-Fri have because they could go to the bank on their day off on Tuesday or whatever.
> Are you trying to say that banks can't be open on the weekends because then bank employees would have to work weekends? Much like any business that operates on the weekends?
I'm saying there's a reason not all businesses (or government institutions) work 996[0].
White collars have the luxury of limited hours, resting on the weekends, and being able to take time off work when they have an appointment or obligation.
This is absolutely true. When I worked as at a restaurant, the mantra from management was: "You got time to lean, you got time to clean." I've worked a lot of blue-collar jobs before making my way into office work. Blue collar workers will get chided for pulling out their phone. I'm posting this comment to HN on either side of a call that came in while I was reading the thread.
In my first real office job, I grew anxious when someone from down the hall came and conversed with my office-mate for ten minutes. We had all this work that needed to be addressed! I'm obviously acclimated to office culture now; I'm just trying to underscore the difference in work culture for those who may not have worked in physical labor environments. The people working those jobs aren't even an afterthought to many people (which I can attest from having dealt with people who mistreat workers).
If you try to contact me with a phone call, you might as well send your message into outer space. You'll have better luck getting a response from aliens.
99% of incoming calls to my phone are spam. I won't pick up an unknown number unless someone has already contacted me and told me to be expecting a phone call, or it's a call from someone I already know (people I already know don't call me either).
That is to say, your mileage may vary on what counts as a "suitable medium".
Used to be that people had phones at the desk at work and a voicemail inbox. In a business situation I would expect most people to be reachable by phone.
This reminds me: when people insist on having a real phone call in an email, it could be something that they don't like to put in writing. So it's a good practice to ask what the topic of the phone call will be so that you can join it prepared.
If it indeed is something that you feel might be fishy, I further recommend the following: write a summary of what was discussed and send your summary to the people on the call as "meeting minutes -- 2026-02-11" (make this a habit, and always say "I do this routinely to remember what was agreed"). This can easily avoid you being trapped by dubious propsals or being unwittingly on the wrong side of the law.
I record my phone calls for personal records. Often I won't hear or remember details, so the recording helps.
Are there legal or other situations in which meeting minutes would be admissible in evidence, but a recording would not be? Obviously this is jurisdiction dependent.
if you make a recording, transcribe it, the delete the recording, it's probably hard to prove you made a recording. better yet with todays technology you can probably make a transcription live. i don't know if feeding he audio into a transcription tool counts as recording.
but the example was to use a recording in court. if you do that then everyone knows.
Samsung S24 Ultra with the stock dialer. I use DW Contacts to manage my address books, but stick with the stock dialer specifically for the recording feature. I understand this is CSC dependent.
Different people and different work environments have different rules.'
I view my email once per week. If you need an immediate answer from me, I expect you to send me a slack/chat/pagerduty warning, even one that says "I sent you an email, I need answer by tomorrow".
Even if they communicate visibly it doesn't always work. I don't use slack / pagerduty (not even sure what that is) and I'm not going to install or set up an account on some random proprietary service just to meet the demands of one email recipient. It might be fine in certain contexts (e.g. team members or friends/family who all use the same communication apps) but it breaks down when you're communicating with arbitrary members of the public.
Those are work tools. If you work for a company that uses them, you ought to have them installed on your work machine. This is not unreasonable.
If your friends are using random apps, screw them. They'll find a way to get a hold of you if they care enough. Or you'll eventually figure out what the majority are using and cave.
> If you work for a company that uses them, you ought to have them installed on your work machine. This is not unreasonable.
I covered that with "It might be fine in certain contexts (e.g. team members..." and "it breaks down when you're communicating with arbitrary members of the public". A lot of the comments in this thread seem to be assuming that the only communications that ever take place are intra-company. For many people that isn't true at all. For me the vast majority of work-related communications are to clients and third parties. I can't just say "screw them" or "they'll find a way to get hold of me if they care enough" or tell them to use slack to inform me that they've emailed me. I have to live in the real world.
Exactly. But it also works the other way. If you expect people to read your emails within 24 hours, make it very clear that that's a business need. Otherwise some of them will not.
Absolutely! The author doesn't mention what type of communication he means, but for business communications (in Belgium, where the author is from), anything over 24 hours (one working day) must have some explanation.
It's always better to explain yourself, otherwise, it looks unprofessional if you reply after a week as though it's normal.
Overall, the recommendations about email look very personal to the author and perhaps shouldn't be taken as general advice.
That’s what out-of-office automatic replies are for, which will include information on what business day you will be back, and often will also specify who is your substitute while you’re away.
"Out of office" just means that you don't access your work email. If that's the case for 350 days a year for you, then the discussion is pretty moot anyway.
Everyone thinks that their inquiries are urgent, top priority. That's not always the case, it maybe urgent to you, but not to the other person.
If something is critical, you can communicate via other means: phone calls, SMS, slack, etc.. and even then, there's no guarantee you will get a response.
In business context, I lean the other way, tend to give all parties as much leg room as possible.
I think The Eisenhower Method is a great fit for prioritization.
Airbnb recently sent me a terms change email that doesnt apply for six months and I dont use it anyway, but email headers set it to urgent and important.
It's more like two business days in the academia, and only if a simple response is enough. Complex questions often take longer, because coming up with an answer may take an hour or two of uninterrupted time.
And if it's a cold email requesting something beyond a reply, and you don't have an existing business relationship with the sender, there is no expectation that you respond. An endless stream of requests from less reputable entities is an unavoidable fact of academic life. Such requests often go directly to the spam folder, as people have collectively decided that they are spam and trained the spam filters accordingly. Even if you think your request is legitimate, it can be indistinguishable from spam.
Hear such mixed things on that though, often it's oh academics love to hear someone wants to read their paper, just email them, they'll be only too happy to provide you with a pdf.
So I tried it once; no reply. (A month or two after it was published too, not something that might've been difficult to dig up.) Probably straight to spam.
> In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours.
Sounds funny because I only read mails when someone tell me about them on MSTeams.
Between IM, supports tickets and jira stories I don't really see the point of emails anymore. If it is something that has an SLA tickets seem to be the way to go, if not Teams. If it is an urgent matter, mentioning my name or calling me will be a quicker way to go. Email seem to be in that weird place where some people still seem to want to insert invisible business matters in an ocean of junk and automatized mails/notifications you generally never subscribe yourself but ends up subscribed by default when given access to resources/applications.
(1) I don't have Jira, (2) I don't want to fill out a SLA ticket, (3) I don't use Teams, (4) I don't know your phone number and/or prefer to deal with things in writing.
Email works because: (a) it is ubiquitous, (b) you don't have to pay for some proprietary software to use it, (c) you remain in control of your data (no IM messages suddenly disappearing), (d) you have a permanent, local, copy of what was said in writing, (e) it's often the standard court-recognised form of communication, other than post, for things that matter legally (e.g. sending notices).
That's not to say that email isn't without many defects. But it's still the best we have for many work-related use cases.
> (1) I don't have Jira, (2) I don't want to fill out a SLA ticket, (3) I don't use Teams, (4) I don't know your phone number and/or prefer to deal with things in writing.
You don't know my email address either so that's ok!
Teams may work for your internal messages but if you deal with anyone outside of your own employer email is still the standard for communication. Not every piece of business that gets done fits into a ticket system.
> if you deal with anyone outside of your own employer email is still the standard for communication
I get what you're saying and agree email is almost always the least common denominator between two different organizations.
On the flip side, this can really vary based on the relationship between two orgs and how closely they might work with each other. I've definitely had Teams instances with outside users and Slack channels shared between multiple orgs when there's a lot of close daily collaboration happening.
Very loose relationship, don't repeatedly contact the same groups of external people over time. We manufacture and sell physical products, and customers ask us questions about them. Sometimes directly, sometimes via their contact at one of fifty-ish local rep agencies depending on where they're located.
Frequently email threads have an assortment of people from 3-4 different companies on them, the specific set of which I will never talk to again outside of that inquiry.
On the rep agency side, they might each represent 50-100 different manufacturers and I'm sure are not eager to have a different ticketing system or chat app channel for contacting each one of them.
> Teams may work for your internal messages but if you deal with anyone outside of your own employer email is still the standard for communication. Not every piece of business that gets done fits into a ticket system.
Nobody ever expect a reply within 24hour from someone outside of your organization, unless these terms have been set already that you are working on a common project with strict deadlines.
I also find my SMS/iMessage increasingly polluted by companies that have probably discovered that their emails are filtered automatically or otherwise and no one responds to them any longer.
Primarily, email gets used for customer-facing comms (they aren't in Jira). It also gets used for lots of system notifications that could probably be moved to Slack, but inertia is a bitch and they remain in email.
24 hours is ridiculous. I spent over 3 hours replying to emails yesterday and didn’t get through them all. And now I’m even more backed up on projects.
I think this really depends on your role. I don't get enough emails in a day to require 3 hours of replies.
More generally, though, the response can be as simple as "We have received this email; the request will take some time, here's roughly when you can expect an update."
If I ask a quote, get it, and answer only 2w later, I will probably apologize. If someone sends me a quote unprovoked, they shouldn't have any expectations of getting an answer, and if I answer even late, I won't apologize.
If my boss or people working on my project send me an email to get a status on something and it takes me a week to answer, I'll apologize- even if that's because I was busy on something more important. If a random colleague asks me for something unrelated with my direct responsibilities, similarly I'll get to it if I get to it when I get to it, and I dont think they should have expectations of receiving an answer, so I won't apologize
Yeah, dude, but sometimes I do consider the matter unimportant, and it's a useful signal to send to the other person.
Your important might not be mine, and that's perfectly fine. Professionals negotiate that difference, instead of unilaterally deciding the other is blowing them off.
My rule is: 2 business days if I know you, 2-4 business days if I don’t know you but you are offering something of actual value to me, up to infinity for everyone else. I only offer an apology for the first group.
I am a site test engineer. I am also the primary contact for site test related questions internally for our factory and from customer and colleagues.
If your question needs a answer within 24 hours
, give me a call and I will do my best to answer. If you send me an email, without any clear urgency, I will respond when I have time. Typically within a week.
This must be why so many spammers now have automation set up to send me the first spam, then a second a day later asking if I got the first one, then a third to ask if I am still interested or willing to let their exciting opportunity to pass by. And then restarting the pattern in a month or so.
I think that for many cases that should be modified from 24 hours to by the end of the next business day. I feel no obligation to reply on a Sunday to someone who emails me on Saturday or late Friday. They can wait until Monday.
This was previously true but no longer. Anyone who sends an email instead of a DM for something requiring a 24 hour turn around bears the responsibility for any resulting delay in 2026.
In email communications with friends, it varies. I'll often let conversations hang for a while until there's something new to discuss.