Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

Is your e-mail going unanswered?

As a general rule the chance of your e-mail getting a response is inversely proportional to the number of people on the To and Cc lines.

Let's take an example:

You e-mail Bob a question. Bob now feels directly responsible for your question and promptly replies.

You e-mail Bob, Anna, and Frank a question and put them all on the To line. Now Bob, Anna, and Frank are only one third responsible each for replying and all three ignore your e-mail hoping one of the other two will respond.

Psychologists call this "diffusion of responsibility".

Published Friday, June 29, 2007 11:00 AM by Kristoffer
Filed under:

Comments

# re: Is your e-mail going unanswered?

Friday, June 29, 2007 4:24 PM by Michael Favro

That is only true if Bob, Anna, and Frank are peers.  If Anna and Frank are higher on the food chain and included on the cc: line, Bob would reply to your email before you even clicked send, if that were possible!!

New Comments to this post are disabled
 
Page view tracker