Fast
How do some people reply to emails so quickly?
Tom Blofmield (Monzo’s founder and YC partner) says that responding to email is becoming unmanageable. But I’ve found that there are some people who are insanely good at it: people who probably receive more inbound than he does, yet respond within minutes if not hours.
I wrote to four such people to ask how they do it. Three of them, Tyler Cowen, Matt Levine, and Bryan Caplan, responded within three minutes to an hour (Tyler was the fastest:
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They all said (or their response suggested) the same thing: they just do it. Two of them agreed with Tom that they receive too many messages: one said that he ignores email that does not seem worthwhile (and suggested he’s good at spotting worthwhile messages), while the other said that he goes through as much as he can, but if he doesn’t clear a batch of emails in a day, they’ll go forever unanswered.
Their responses had two things in common: first, obviously, they were unreasonably fast — I get slower responses from many of my friends (my family follow the same pattern as my three correspondents: they either respond within minutes, or they ignore me. Usually the latter). Second, their responses were very brief. So let me expand a bit on what I think is going on, and on what I think makes some people so fast (I’ve written about this before, but making it more succinct here):
An obvious point made by my wife is that all three correspondents are primarily office-based. Presumably, Tom spends more time away from his desk, meeting people, going to events, etc, than they do. So that helps. But it’s definitely not the full story — most office workers are far slower to respond, despite receiving fewer emails.
Let’s take the three at their word — there’s a lot to be said for just doing things. Too many people spend too much time planning and overthinking. To quote another nugget of wisdom from my wife (you’d all be better-served if she were writing a Substack), this is linked to confidence: some people are good at jumping to doing things because they don’t second-guess themselves.
These three are writers. They have spent decades writing (and therefore thinking) about many different things, which means they can respond quickly because they’ve probably encountered the same questions before. Experience and maintaining a well-thought out model of the world make it easier to respond on the fly: you don’t need to formulate an answer from scratch.
It’s interesting that in my professional experience, there is a very strong correlation between speed of response and general ability. Most people who respond quickly are very good at their jobs; and conversely, very few people who are slow are good. (I think the second effect is the stronger: there are some people who respond quickly but aren’t very good. It’s much rarer to find someone who is slow at responding but still good at their work.)
I’d love to invite thoughts on this in the comments. Have you also noticed a correlation between speed and ability? Do you think there are other factors that make some people faster?