What is up with this new glacial pace of academic emailing?

Post date: 2022-05-19 14:25:43

At first, one colleague took forever to reply to me. Then another, and another. At this point, it's beginning to seem like a weird new normal. What is going on here? Did everyone get the "slow your emails" memo but me?

Over the past year or so, my academic collaborators have become slower and slower in their email response times. These days, profs - with whom I have established working/collaborative relationships, mind you - might take weeks, even over a month, to reply to me. It's true that the emails which receive slow responses are not urgent in nature - they concern project plans which might be a few months out, or collaborations which are ongoing. Nonetheless I'm finding the increasing delays difficult: they leave me unable to take next steps or make plans for unknown and ultimately quite lengthy periods of time.

My spouse is not experiencing this kind of slowdown in his (non-academic) work, and I'm only experiencing it among academics, so it seems like this slowness is specific to university contexts.

Is this a new covid-era normal? Is it even a trend? Or is it just my weird individual experience?

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