it’s a message, not a summons

 

Just because technology allows us to reply to someone in real time does not mean you have an obligation to do so. You don’t have to apologize for taking time to respond!

This is meant for those that want to maintain a healthy balance between work, personal life, and technology. I consider a reply timely and professional if it’s within 24 hours. Obviously if it’s an emergency you should respond sooner!

As long as a reply isn’t urgent or necessary, remember it’s a message, not a summons. I really struggle with this and have had to stop myself from dropping everything to respond.

I totally understand this feeling! I’ve gotten so stressed out and worked up over messages I’ve gotten while at work, at school, or otherwise dealing with something else far more important, that I’ve been unable to respond to or didn’t know how to respond to immediately. It’s crazy how it’s just become the norm for people to demand responses immediately even though its way better for everyone involved to have time to process information before responding to it, especially if it’s of a sensitive nature of any kind.

I hate Facebook for forcing this on people in Messenger. I have no idea what purpose is of making it so the person you’re messaging can see whether or not you’ve seen the message or not aside from trying to cause fights between people. I’m aware you can get around this in a few ways but that aside, it’s still ridiculous that you can’t simply turn the read receipts off like you can with iMessage chats. It’s helped to breed this culture of assuming someone is ignoring you because they “saw” your message right when you sent it because they might’ve had their phone or browser open or whatever but didn’t respond right away when they saw it because they were busy or simply didn’t want to respond to it right away.

I miss the “G2G” days of IM and MSN, because all the awesome aspects of chatting online were there, but you got to walk away from it after a conversation and weren’t expected to respond to messages until you signed in again, and there wasn’t the same expectation for an immediate response like there is now.