Five Unwritten Rules About Response Times
And How to Navigate Them
Note: I’ve made the difficult decision that starting next week, I’m shifting the Friday article to paid subscribers only. The Tuesday article will still go out to everyone. Honestly, the twice-a-week schedule is pretty intense given my other commitments, and this feels like the only reasonable way to sustain it—thank you for supporting my work either way.
Collaboration requires communication and communication requires tight feedback loops, but that isn’t always possible.
In fairness, most of the time, messages go out, responses come back, and nobody has to think about it. No agreement or policy. It just works.
But when it doesn’t—when someone goes quiet for no reason, or when you get called out for not responding fast enough—you realize how much implicit expectations were holding the whole thing together. When that happens, we want to clarify things, but we aren’t really sure how.
In the end, we end up with frustration. We get frustrated when people take too long to respond, but we also get frustrated when people expect too much of us—expecting responses whenever it’s convenient for them.
Rules About Response Times
Some European countries have even created legislation to protect workers from demanding work expectations. Germany’s largest automakers have formal works agreements. France passed a national law that requires companies with 50 or more employees to formally negotiate when workers are and aren’t expected to respond to work communications.
But the research on how these policies actually perform is sobering. One year after France’s right-to-disconnect law took effect, 97% of workers reported no observable change. Nearly a quarter of employees in covered companies didn’t even know the law existed.
Goldman Sachs had a formal named policy—no office contact between Friday at 9pm and Sunday at 9am—that managers routinely ignored until a leaked analyst survey forced a public reckoning.
The language, it turns out, is not the hard part.
As you might expect, my recommendation is going to be something like, “make your expectations explicit,” but actually I don’t think creating rules around response times, or trying to get the phrasing exactly right, is necessarily the best way to go.
And that’s because there are several unwritten rules around response times we should account for first. Once you understand them, you’ll be in a much better position to decide what to do about them.
1. “The channel signals the level of urgency.”
Regardless of the message itself, the medium or the channel of that message tends to communicate a lot. A phone call means right now. A text means soon, probably today. An email means when you get to it. A Slack message—well, that depends on the team.
But while we need to account for this implicit channel-urgency connection, it’s not the only reason why someone may use a particular channel.
Someone might send a text simply because they’re away from their desk, or they’re in a meeting. If your boss doesn’t usually text you and suddenly does, it’s easy to read urgency into it—even if the content of the message is routine.
What to do about it:
Clarify your own channel-based policy: “If you need something from me urgently or just that day, please WhatsApp me. Otherwise, send an email.”
When something is genuinely time-sensitive, say so in the message itself. Don’t rely on the channel to carry that signal for you.
2. “Respond on the same channel.”
When someone Slacks you, they expect a Slack reply. When someone emails, they expect an email back. This one mostly takes care of itself—people follow it without thinking. Which is actually a good illustration of how unwritten rules tend to operate. Nobody enforces them, but then nobody usually needs to.
What to do about it:
If you’re reaching out on a channel you don’t normally use, say why. “Sending this by text because I’m traveling—no urgency” reduces the chances the receiver will make up a story about it.
Conversely, sometimes you need to send a more urgent message via a slower platform, so tagging your email title with “Response Requested by end of week” helps the receiver notice it.
3. “The faster you respond, the more is expected of you.”
Consistent five-minute replies train people to expect five-minute replies. It’s not fair, but it’s understandable. The expectations others have of your availability are partly a product of your own past behavior.
Researchers Barber and Santuzzi coined the term “workplace telepressure” to describe the internalized urge to respond immediately to work messages—and found it was directly associated with burnout, poor sleep, and difficulty detaching from work.
The pressure to respond quickly isn’t always coming from the outside. Often it’s coming from us.
What to do about it:
You’re allowed to be slow sometimes. If you’ve trained people to expect speed, a simple note—“I’m heads-down today, will get back to you this afternoon”—can reset the expectation.
If you’re a sender, don’t make the other person responsible for getting your needs met. If they aren’t responding, follow up. And follow-up again. Make it clear you’re advocating for yourself, not trying to harass them: “Hey, pinging you again about this. I know you’re busy and didn’t want this to get lost.”
4. “Silence communicates...something.”
When you don’t respond to a message, you’re not saying nothing. Silence reads as “I missed it,” or “I saw it and it’s not urgent.” Those have very different implications, and the person waiting can’t tell which one.
Researchers Giurge and Bohns at Cornell ran eight studies with over 4,000 participants and found that receivers consistently overestimate how urgently senders expect a response—especially to messages sent outside business hours.
Meaning, a lot of the stress around response times is self-generated. But silence to something that seemed important leaves the other person to fill in the blank. They usually go with the worst case.
What to do about it:
A quick acknowledgment—“Got it, will follow up later today”—does more work than most people realize. It doesn’t require a full response. It just closes the loop on the uncertainty.
If you’re constantly waiting on people to respond to things, try sharing your intent instead so you can still move forward even if you don’t hear anything.
5. “Not every message needs a response.”
Some messages are FYIs. The sender isn’t waiting for anything. They just wanted to share information. But the recipient doesn’t know that, so they feel a low-grade pressure of an unanswered thing sitting in their inbox.
Meanwhile, messages that genuinely do need a response often don’t say so clearly—and get treated like FYIs.
The Cornell research mentioned above found that when senders explicitly communicated what they needed (or explicitly said they didn’t need anything), the stress receivers felt dropped significantly.
What to do about it:
If you get an unclear message, it’s not 100% your responsibility to decode it. Bounce it right back with something like: “Happy to help, but not sure what you need here...”
Flag your messages. “FYI—no need to respond” and “Can you get back to me on this by Thursday?” Most of the ambiguity around response times lives right here, in messages that don’t say what they actually need from the other person.
Conclusion
Most of the tensions about response times don’t require a formal policy to solve. They require a little more explicitness at the right moment—senders who signal what they need, respondents who clarify their context, and teams that take time to talk about setting expectations when they aren’t also trying to resolve some conflict about it.
Many of the rules around response times are unwritten and already operating. And while you might need to make some of them explicit, the main question is how well you can navigate the ones that are already there.