A Lot of People Answer Email in the Bathroom

Have you ever been out to dinner at a downtown place and looked around to see how many people are checking their phones at the table? In my experience, it’s usually a lot of people and these people are working. Taking calls, making notes on napkins. Sending and receiving lengthy emails. A person checking work email at dinner assumes a vaguely religious posture: head bowed, palms together, focus inward, like a capitalist Grace. I always imagine these are the same people who eat lunch at their desks. In the evenings, they bring their desks to dinner. 

What’s even more bizarre is the situation in the bathroom. There are always one or two guys in there pacing around, gesturing emphatically and muting their microphones when other people flush. Guys who will lean against the sink for ten minutes, faces spot-lit by an iPhone, crafting a multi-paragraph email. I have seen men in a bathroom haul out their laptops. 

It’s easy to see these people and think: You’re embarrassing yourself. Real power means you don’t have to answer email at dinner. What kind of life is it where you can’t get through dinner without responding to email?

When you were young, is this the person you dreamed of becoming?

I never think this because, for a long time, the person on the receiving end of those emails was me.  

The best email I ever wrote

At the start of my career I worked for a big law firm in a big city. One of the partners I worked with was nocturnal. He would get into the office around noon and talk on the phone all afternoon. He would head out around 7pm for a client dinner and continue working from home afterwards. 

Before leaving for dinner, he would drop by my office and ask me to do whatever work emerged from his afternoon’s calls. I would stay at the office doing the work, and we would correspond by email throughout his dinner. (This was in the time of Blackberries, not iPhones, so our “emails” were more like text messages.) Any issues we couldn’t resolve via email would have to wait until after dinner, at which point we would have a call, and then I could finally go home. 

Eventually I figured out that in order to have any chance of getting home before midnight, I needed to send this partner emails that he could answer during dinner. The emails had to be thorough, nuanced and smart, but also deal-with-able by someone leaning against a bathroom sink. Writing these emails felt galling and ridiculous, right up until I realized that these were some of the best I ever wrote. 

Responding to email is secretly demanding

When you email someone, you make certain demands on their attention. You’re demanding that they open your message; read it; think about it; and respond. All of that takes time and effort, but because you can’t see the person responding to your email, it’s easy to forget what kind of time and effort is required. 

Maybe an analogy here is the weirdness of talking to someone on a videoconference when you’ve previously only talked by phone. All of a sudden, it’s painfully obvious that people can do other things while they listen to you: look out the window, doodle, mute the line and talk to some other person. That’s all obviously possible when you talk to someone on the phone, but you can’t see it. You have to imagine that whomever you’re talking to is doing the exact same thing that you’re also doing, probably. 

The demands being made by your email become immediately apparent when the person you’re emailing is in the bathroom. You realize their possible responses are limited and the easiest ones are “Yes”, “No” and “Let’s talk later.”

You also realize that only certain kinds of questions can elicit a Yes/No response, and that any other questions are likely to be met with “Let’s talk later.” 

You learn that any uncertainty in the text of your email will be met with “Let’s talk later.” (Clarifying an email by sending even more emails is always tedious, but it’s a non-starter when someone’s responding in between their salad and the main course.) You start to anticipate questions and concerns and to address those proactively. You discover that the more emails you send about an issue, the less confidence people have in your ability to resolve that issue. You learn to suggest a specific course of action like, “I think we should discuss further at 1pm tomorrow,” which is much better than, “Happy to discuss at your convenience.” 

What kind of email would you want to get? 

Even if you never send email to people in bathrooms, it’s helpful to imagine that’s where people will be dealing with your email. Doing that requires more work on your part, definitely. It requires more forethought, intentionality and proofreading. It requires you to think about what kind of email is useful to the recipient of that email. It causes you to write email that people will actually read, and makes it easy for them to reply to in a way that’s useful for you. 

If you don’t like the thought of people checking email in the bathroom, here’s another way to think about it: What kind of email would you want to get at dinner? 

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Making the Ordinary Strange is a series of articles about communication and how to do it better. Since most people already know how to communicate, the way to get better is to just do more of what you already know works well. The challenge isn’t learning but noticing—paying attention to how you communicate with other people—which is tricky, because communication happens all the time, like breathing, and how often do you think about breathing? Communication is ordinary, and the ordinary is invisible—until someone makes it strange. (To read more please visit www.TellPeople.ca.)