When - is the right time?

Imagine the following: you are reading your e-mails at 1 p.m. on a Friday before a long weekend, and are anticipating your early departure to beat traffic and enjoy your time off. A new message pops in, detailing a project that requires significant effort. The deadline? Monday morning. What do you do? If the e-mail is from your manager, of course you take action. If it is not – and remember that Toastmasters is a volunteer organization – it will very likely go ignored.

What happened? The audience of the message was not given adequate time to plan and execute the task – a classic case of the last-minute fire drill.

Timing is everything when it comes to communication. There is tried and true wisdom – such as not sending e-mails with requests on weekends or around holidays, just when everyone is trying to clear their (virtual) desks. Still, the key is to know your audience, and when the best time is to reach them.

A few rules of thumb will help you time your messages:

• Give your audience enough time to respond. Assume that they cannot drop everything to get back to you right away; give them the appropriate time, such as a week. Do not solicit them at the last minute.
• Let your audience know when you need a response. Without a deadline, there is no urgency. And, as we know, a task expands to fill the entire time allotted, so plan a little buffer in case someone gets back to you a day late.
• Follow up with your audience, as promised. If you tell them you will provide more information, make sure you do it. Don’t be “that person” who promises, “I’ll call you” – only to never be heard from again!
• Send reminders. If there is a long interval between the request and the completion date of a task, send a reminder the week prior to the actual deadline.
• Spread the wealth. Don’t overwhelm your audience with too many requests. That may include coordinating with others who are also sending requests to the same audience.

If you do your job right, then you will never hear the classic response, “Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine!”