E-mail, Text, Call or BBM me! Just get back to me.

I wasn’t around when they were using smoke or training pigeons to deliver messages. Telegraph lost its popularity by 1960s. Telephones and e-mail were already ruling the communication world by the time I made it out of my mother’s womb. As my friend, Musa Yesil revealed recently, nowadays we can not imagine waiting for a message’s delivery beyond a few minutes.

As part of the new bright generation, we all become avid users of the Internet and cell phones. They are our most advanced and common tools of communication. When we are kids, we receive fake computers and pillows shaped in phones as gifts. A real cell phone is glued to our  hands when we are old enough to go out without our parents. We are so content with their functionality that most of us do not even have landlines installed inside the apartments. We are all a few clicks and dial tones away from each other, no matter where we are. Although with the advancements in technology, we no longer have to wait more than a few seconds to deliver a message, we are still constrained by the incentives of the side receiving the message to get a reply. We willingly lower the speed of the technology because we are too slow, lazy, ignorant or busy to catch up with it or are too proud to obey its non-mistaken strict work ethic. We take our time and delay the reply for an acceptable duration based on the person and the device that delivered the message. Although it is hard to predict some variables of the equation, it is easy to calculate the appropriate delay for replying to a message based on its technology source. Here are the accepted delays for today’s most common tools of communication:

E-mail: 3-4 days. Replying too fast means you are either too interested or too desperate.
Call: 1-2 days. It is acceptable to call back in a day or so as being on a call usually requires both parties’ full attention. Picking up and saying you’ll call back whenever you are free is always the most appropriate option (although most of us avoid it almost always).
Text message: A few minutes to a few hours. Beyond a few hours means you are just annoyed and not interested (given that you do not have a reasonable excuse).
BBM: First of all thanks to the (D) for delivered and (R) for read, you are not left much room to play around. To delay the reply you will have to avoid clicking on the message. That way it will appear as (D) until you feel like you want to reply and continue the conversation. There is no excuse if you read and decide not to reply within a few minutes. The message you are sending is pretty obvious when that happens.