How long you should wait to respond to manager’s email?

I have been having conversations with friends and co-workers about the appropriate amount of time to respond to a manager’s email.

Some people say a week, others say 24-48 hours, and some say within a few hours. The urgency factor also comes into play as not all requests are created equal.

This video is about level-setting my own expectations and coming to terms with my management style. Do I have reasonable timelines or not?

I did some google research and even asked ChatGPT.

Watch the video and let me know your thoughts on what is a reasonable response window.

News You Can Use: 2/26/2020


Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

  • Why Developing Self-Awareness Is Key to Managing Your Time

    The key to time management is self-awareness. But don’t just take my word for it: As Erich C. Dierdorff notes at HBR, awareness, along with arrangement and adaptation, are the skills that “separate time management success from failure.” Research shows that “people struggled the most with awareness and adaptation skills where assessment scores were, on average, 24 percent lower than for arrangement skills.”

    I particularly appreciated the action words used by Dierdorff: “assessment: and “adaption.”

    “This evidence suggests that awareness and adaptation are not only rarer skills, but are more difficult to develop naturally without direct interventions,” writes Dierdorff. “Additionally, awareness skills were the primary driver of how well people avoided procrastination, and adaptation skills were the primary driver of how well they prioritized activities.”

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/346512

  • A time management coach’s surprising advice for the overly organized

    Saying “no” by either not accepting commitments in the first place or by eliminating commitments that are currently on your plate is your most powerful organizational tool. It’s the equivalent of decluttering your closet before you attempt to hang everything up. By reducing the overall number of items, you make it easier to organize.

    When you “declutter” from a time management perspective, you’re not only giving yourself less to fit into each day but also more time to keep the whole system maintained.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90466063/a-time-management-coachs-surprising-advice-for-the-overly-organized

  • Time Management Tips
  • How to Stay Motivated When Things Get Tough and Stressful

    Stress comes in four primary flavors. It’s important to identify and understand which one you are feeling. First, there’s time stress. Time stress occurs when you worry about time or a lack of time. Impending deadlines often cause time stress. As a time-strapped leader, you’re no stranger to this type of stress, also called anticipatory stress. When you are concerned about an upcoming presentation or board meeting, you’re suffering from anticipatory stress. Remember Murphy’s Law? If anything can go wrong, it will.

    The third type of stress, called situational stress, occurs when you feel you aren’t in control. As a leader, you may experience situational stress when your status drops or you suffer reputational damage. The final type of stress is called encounter stress. It occurs when your interactions with others cause you to feel uneasy. When you interact with a toxic co-worker, you may experience encounter stress.

    It’s also important to understand whether you’re suffering from burnout or stress. Burnout occurs when stress continues for a long time. When you’re suffering from burnout, you feel tired and drained. Your immune system is affected, and you are more likely to get sick. You also feel helpless and lose motivation. Stress is less extensive. When you experience stress, you feel that too much is being demanded of you and you may experience physical effects like muscle tension and headaches, but you don’t feel empty and detached like you do when you’re experiencing burnout.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/337858

  • Embracing the broken: The gift of not chasing perfection

    As I get older and more experienced, the adage of life being about the journey resonates with me. I am in motion and flight, but I am not pursuing a figurative or literal destination.

    The question, particularly for those of us who spend a lot of time online, is how do you resist the perpetual treadmill that society and your inner saboteur (Thanks, Cody!) try to push on you to be perfect?

    You say no.

    As a person, as an entrepreneur, an employee, a visionary, you put your foot down.

    https://www.the-future-of-commerce.com/2020/02/21/stop-chasing-perfection/

News You Can Use: 1/15/2020


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  • Even 4-year-olds dislike freeloaders

    Children from ages 4 to 10 were presented with scenarios in which they had to give up chocolates in order to get a cake or plant seeds in a garden to get tomatoes. All children expressed dislike for those who did not contribute and were even willing to give up stickers to punish them. The youngest subjects exhibited a stronger aversion to free-riders than 9- and 10-year-olds.

    However, when a freeloader has a good excuse for not contributing — e.g. her pet ate her chocolate — the aversion was greatly reduced, the researchers report.

    “Even young children expect cooperation and are willing to work to sustain it even at cost to themselves,” Dunham said. “I find this very positive. The seeds that sustain cooperation seem to emerge early on, and while as a society we need to sustain and nurture these values, we may not need to instill them in the first place.”

    https://news.yale.edu/2018/07/23/even-4-year-olds-dislike-freeloaders

  • Hiring hack: How to better evaluate your candidates | Simon Sinek
  • This Japanese Company Charges Its Staff $100 an Hour to Use Conference Rooms

    At the heart of the program is a compensation system that meticulously tracks how much every person and team contributes to earnings. Workers receive a base salary, which they augment by earning Will for completing tasks. Quarterly bonuses can rival a year’s pay for top performers, says Naito. “It’s enough to buy a foreign-brand car every year,” he says. “We call it the ‘Will Dream.’ ”

    Earning virtual currency begins at the team level, where bosses allocate a portion of the group’s Will budget to each task they must complete. Team members then use an app to bid in an auction for those jobs. Assignments that don’t attract any bids often turn out to be unnecessary, Naito says. And managers who’ve misused or abused the system have been abandoned by their workers, who are free to move to other teams.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-20/charging-employees-for-conference-rooms-helps-disco-boost-profit

  • How to write the best résumé for 2020

    Whether it’s accounts won, servers maintained, leads gained, or warehouses managed, all of our activities in our professional careers can be quantified. By sharing your specific high scores rather than vague duties, you give your future boss the ability to understand how far you can run, how high you can jump, in your career.

    When you start to think in high scores, you’ll banish boring phrases such as “seasoned executive,” “responsible for,” and “managed.” And you’ll recast your experiences to include the most exciting and impressive outcomes you’ve achieved in each area of your job. Share your high scores attained, achievements unlocked, and badges won to attract your future boss’s attention in 2020.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90446884/how-to-write-the-best-resume-for-2020

News You Can Use: 3/8/2017

  • Trump expected to cut federal IT spending

    “Initiatives like data center consolidation and adoption of cloud services – even though not completely successful – have set the table for leaner spending,” Bjorklund said.

    The Trump administration will be helped as well by declines in the cost of IT. It will likely put modernization investments on hold “until they can figure out the way ahead,” Bjorklund said.

    http://www.computerworld.com/article/3174085/it-industry/trump-expected-to-cut-federal-it-spending.html

  • Make your conference calls stink less…

    You need to assume that some of what you’re saying just isn’t going to get through. So go over your key points quickly yet frequently. Think of them as road signs that remind your audience where you’re heading: If you don’t check in every so often, they might get lost. You don’t have to repeat the message in the same exact way every time, but reinforcing your ideas is a must when so many other factors (both technological and human) are conspiring against you.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/3068455/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/your-conference-calls-sound-terrible-but-you-dont-have-to

  • This Video Explains Why “I Don’t Have Time” Is a Poor Excuse
  • The Best Questions to Ask in Every Job Interview Round

    “What are the Immediate Projects You’d Like Me to Work on in the First 30, 60, and 90 days?”

    With this one, you’ll get a sense of what types of tasks your new manager will want you to work on when you first start work. The key here is to keep digging until you’re clear on the first set of expectations for the role.

    http://lifehacker.com/the-best-questions-to-ask-in-every-job-interview-round-1792859446

  • Rethinking Sourcing Suites and Their Sub Components — Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant

    And as procurement organizations increasingly mass-customize how they deliver value to the business and the technology approaches and providers they use to deliver those new capabilities and associated outcomes, we believe that evaluative exercises need to be ever more tailored to an individual organization’s needs. For subscribers, Gartner is moving in this direction as well (which we applaud). But static reports that take six months to create and then are updated every two years with monolithic graphics run counter to this trend.

    http://spendmatters.com/2017/02/09/rethinking-sourcing-suites-sub-components-gartners-2017-magic-quadrant/

Photo: Lionello DelPiccolo