3 things to remember when waiting for someone’s response

Waiting for responses to messages can be challenging because we are living in an “always on” society. Since we all have little devices in our pockets that are our communication centers, we know that people have access to the messages we’ve sent all the time.

And yet, people don’t want to respond to all those messages in real time for a number of reasons.

1. The majority of us are living in the real world where real people who are really right in front of us require our immediate attention — whether that is when we are driving a car or in a meeting or giving a presentation. We can’t live our lives inside of our phones. So even though it is possible for us to be available via phone 24/7, we can only give our attention to one thing at a time — and that is not always our device (thank god).
2. We can experience messaging overload where we receive too many messages at once from too many different people or sources. If I didn’t check my email 50 times a day and delete most of the messages I recieve, I’d have thousands of unread messages piling up. And all those messages would prevent me from getting to the “important” messages that deserve my attention and response. But even though I can quickly check my email while waiting in line for coffee and delete messages that I don’t want, it is much harder to respond…