Open letter to those who feel busier than me.

I've talked about this before, and am told that we have Tim Ferris and his '4-Hour Work Week' book to blame.

I refer to the new trend in automated email responses that say,

"Thanks for your message, I'll take a look shortly as I'm real busy at the moment. I'm currently checking email at 9:00am and 4pm so I can concentrate more of my time on urgent projects."

Or this one,

"I got your email but I now only check my inbox once every morning. I no longer monitor my emails the whole day."

Personally, I find this to be rude in the extreme and am coming close to automatically removing anyone from my lists who disrespects me with such arrogant nonsense.

Am I over reacting? Perhaps. But I think not.

What these messages (they are real ones that I got just this morning) are saying is that the person I'm writing to thinks they are so important that anything I have to say to them can wait.

More so, I am very low on their list of priorities.

And what is particularly insulting is that they feel the need to tell me so.

When I send someone an email - whether a personal one-on-one message or a broadcast email like Kickstart - I KNOW that it is one of many things landing in their inbox. I KNOW that they are not necessarily sitting at their desk waiting to send me an instant response. I KNOW that they are busy.

I'm not stupid. If I happen to get a fast reply I consider it a bonus - not my right.

This is, I admit, a personal bete noire. I would so much prefer that they sent me nothing than a message telling me that they have better things to do with their time than worry about me - I KNOW that already and don't need my face being pushed in it!

This is becoming increasingly common practice - perhaps you do it too. But if you do, have you stopped to think how the person getting the message might feel? Sure, it absolves you from feeling that you have to check your emails all the time - but nobody ever told you that you have to do that anyway.

So what are your motives? To feel more important? To rub peoples' noses in your success? Or just to get up their noses?

Even taken at its most benign, and giving the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the motive is simply to confirm receipt of an email in the same way that a help desk often sends out a 'we have received your message and will reply within 24 hours' reply. If so, then all I can say to that is that you are responsible for a massive waste of email bandwidth. I have sent you an email - I don't need to be told that I've sent you an email (unless I've specifically asked for a receipt).

Don't you think that I'M busy too? How about if I sent you a message to inform you that I'm too busy to read your messages? Will your stupid auto reply respond to that too? Infinite loops?

Tim Ferris talked a lot of sense in his book. Unfortunately, this bit of advice wasn't.

Please stop it.

Martin