The Average Amount of Time It Takes...

... to compose an e-mail for:
Strangers - 1 minute
Colleagues - 3 minutes
Acquaintances - 5 minutes
Most Friends - 10 minutes
Close Friends - 25 minutes
Leslie - 45 minutes
Professors - 1 hour

Now, that may be a slight exaggeration, but it seems like whenever I'm e-mailing a professor, I'm asking for something, and I'm very particular about having a certain level of formality and not inadvertently offending the socks off of them. So when I was suggesting topics, for example, it took plenty of time to think about how to phrase the topic before I even sat down to write the e-mail. Then I kept nitpicking at my presentation, at the opening (Dr. or Prof.? Should I use "Dear?"), and the close (Is "Thank you" too simple? "Best wishes?" "Sincerely" too formal?). They didn't teach us these things in basic letter writing.

And of course most of the time the professors shoot succinct responses that probably took them a minute to make.

To my closer friends and Leslie, in contrast, I just tend to write a lot. To colleagues, I tend to write only confirming e-mails, like "I'll be there," but I experience the same anxiety with addresses so it takes longer. For strangers, I don't care as much about offending them, and the hesitation probably takes a minute.

E-mail etiquette is one of those things that suffers from the lack of a standard to go by. Yes, there are common sense rules for communication, but it's difficult to know how seriously someone is going to take an informality in e-mail. I'd rather either know the perfect way to start and close an e-mail, or know that it really doesn't matter for anyone, rather than shuffle through the doubt. True, it's generally safer to be more formal, but what takes up time isn't so much the formality, as the fretting over it.

One example - in class on Wednesday, someone responded to the professor, "Well, Dr. _____..." and immediately he said, "P___" in a voice that was actually annoyed by the convention. Then he explained he just prefers to be called that by graduate students. It was a sufficient surprise that later, when I was writing the e-mail, I decided to call him "P___." Then, worrying that maybe it'd be different in an e-mail, I wrote a paragraph about how I hoped I wasn't taking a liberty I shouldn't in doing that, because he might want something different over e-mail.

I guess if there's any reflection here, it's that the business world just wouldn't be ready for me. Either that, or I'd never answer the 300 e-mails a day and get all my work done.