Always At Least Acknowledge
Upleveling your electronic communication
What would happen if, when you attended meetings with your team, you never acknowledged anyone in the room and never said anything? Socially, this would considered awkward. Professionally, this would impact the entire team. You would rightfully be labeled unprofessional and you’d get clear feedback1 from management that it needed to be corrected.
So how come people get away with never acknowledging other people’s electronic communications? That’s because, quite sadly, it’s become the norm. The excuses are commonplace. “I’m buried in my mail. Can you text me instead?” “Wait, we’re supposed to be watching for messages on Slack too?”
Study after study shows the continued rise of electronic communication. So the idea of feeling behind is not at all surprising. But accepting weak electronic communication for your team will hurt you all in the long run. Regular communication is the backbone to your team’s overall health. Rather than accepting this, you can take action to address this for yourself, and model the simplicity of your approach for your teammates to follow.
At Microsoft, I guaranteed a response to your communication within 24 hours (excluding weekends, of course). That response might just be an acknowledgement that I’ve received it and that more work is needed on my part before I can respond, in which case I would also try to provide an ETA for when that response would be. “Thanks for the mail. This will take me some time to read through all of this and respond. You will hear back from me by EOD Thursday.” But for every communication that was needing a response, I gave a response within 24 hours.
Satisfying this guarantee required 60 minutes on my daily schedule (45 minutes for email, 15 minutes for Teams messages and thread). Is a 10% cost to my time worth it to make this guarantee? Absolutely, because this contributed to the team’s steady and continuous progress. And when others saw that it was possible and manageable, they followed suit and the whole team benefited.
If all we do is communicate, we’re not making any progress on our work. But if we can’t effectively communicate, then we’re also not going to make much progress either. It’s a balancing act. You need to care enough about communication to keep the team moving forward, but don’t care so much that there’s no time for anything else.
This approach builds on the Energy Flywheel2, Timebox Everything3, and Triage Shield4 concepts I’ve already elaborated on in earlier posts. If, as I lay out my approach, you are doubting that it will apply to your situation, refer to these other posts to help convince you that we’re not all that different.
This exercise is best done once holistically. I will walk through these steps, and use my own answers as an example for you to follow. It’s a five step process to take control of all of your electronic communications.
Take inventory
Estimate volume
Establish guarantees
Compute daily cost
Block time on calendar
Take inventory
What are all the different forms of electronic communication you use, for both work and personal? List them all out and then group them by category.
Text
SMS
WhatsApp
Signal
Work email account #1
Work email account #2
Personal email
Junk email (if you don’t already have a separate email account that you use for all the digital memberships you sign up for, and that predominantly generate junk mail, I’d recommend doing it)
Team Collaboration (direct messaging and threads)
Teams
Slack
Social Media (direct messaging and comments)
Substack
LinkedIn
Strava
X
Facebook
Instagram
Phone
Voicemail
Estimate volume
With your list in place, go through and ballpark the volume of communication you get for each.
Text
SMS: 20/day
WhatsApp: 50/day
Signal: 5/week
Work email account #1: 20/day (at Microsoft, this was 300/day)
Work email account #2: 10/week
Personal email: 10/day
Junk email: 20/day
Team Collaboration
Teams: 20/day (at Microsoft, this was 100/day)
Slack: 5/week
Social Media
Substack: 5/day
LinkedIn: 10/week
Strava: 5/day
X: 1/week
Facebook: 5/week
Instagram: 1/week
Phone
Voicemail: 5/week
Establish guarantees
Now comes the hard part. Reflect on the relative volumes of each and the relative significance of the types of communication that happen on each. What guaranteed response time for each form communication would be most ideal, balancing between your time commitment to manage the communication and the responsiveness benefit to others.
Remember, you’re just guaranteeing an acknowledgement, which can be as simple as, “Thanks for the message. I will get back to you by EOD Friday.” My Triage Shield4 posts can help add clarity to everything involved in this triage process so you can estimate more accurately.
Text
SMS: 12 hours
WhatsApp: 8 hours
Signal: 24 hours
Work email account #1: 12 hours (at Microsoft, this was 8 hours)
Work email account #2: 12 hours
Personal email: 24 hours
Junk email: 24 hours
Team Collaboration
Teams: 8 hours
Slack: 1 week
Social Media
Substack: 24 hours
LinkedIn: 24 hours
Strava: 24 hours
X: 1 week
Facebook: 24 hours
Instagram: 3 days
Phone
Voicemail: 3 days
With these guarantees established, now you can add clarity by recategorizing your list by guarantee length, sorted from shortest to longest.
8 hours
WhatsApp
Teams
12 hours
SMS
Work email account #1
Work email account #2
24 hours
Signal
Personal email
Junk email
Substack
LinkedIn
Strava
Facebook
3 days
Voicemail
Instagram
1 week
Slack
X
Compute daily cost
How long will it take you to triage each of these communication forms, getting through your estimated volume of messages, so that you can maintain your guarantee? Compute this for each item, and then add them up under each guarantee length to calculate the daily cost for each guarantee length.
8 hours (total: 3 min every 8 hours; 9 min per day)
WhatsApp: 1 min
Teams: 2 min
12 hours (total: 8 min every 12 hours; 16 min per day)
SMS: 1 min
Work email account #1: 5 min
Work email account #2: 2 min
24 hours (total: 26 min)
Signal: 1 min
Personal email: 5 min
Junk email: 2 min
Substack: 10 min
LinkedIn: 3 min
Strava: 2 min
Facebook: 3 min
3 days (total: 4 min every 3 days)
Voicemail: 3 min
Instagram: 1 min
1 week (total: 4 min every week)
Slack: 3 min
X: 1 min
Total this up to see your overall daily cost to maintain these guarantees. For me, this works out to 53 minutes per day (20 for work, and 33 for personal). At Microsoft, the work piece was 60 minutes, so that would have been 93 minutes total for the day. That’s high, but is still a manageable daily amount of time.
Block time on calendar
Now all that’s left is to put blocks on your calendar for when you’re going to do the triaging of each of your communication forms. Remember that you can always come in under this guarantee, and you are free to check messages at any other time that permits. Having these blocks ensures that you will at least check for new messages at that interval, to enable you to meet your guaranteed response times.
While I was at Microsoft, my structure looked like this:
Work 8-hour guarantees: email and Teams - 20 min - start of workday, middle of workday, end of workday.
Personal 12-hour guarantees: email and text - 5 min - lunch and evening
Personal 24-hour guarantees: 15 min - evening
Footnotes
Triage Shield, with relevant follow-up posts for Managing Email and Herding Chats