What the four-minute reply teaches

Everything so far has been about what the reply gives you and what it costs. This chapter is about what it does to the person who receives it, because that's where the habit lives, and it lives longer than the evening.

Think about it from Priya's side. She sent a question at nine, half expecting to use the old numbers. She got an answer at fourteen minutes past. She didn't consciously note it, but something in her updated. Next Tuesday, at nine, with a different question, she'll send it a little more readily, because last time it worked. The Tuesday after, she'll send one she'd otherwise have saved for the morning. She isn't being pushy. She's been taught, by you, that nine is a time you answer, and she's acting on what she learned. That's the lesson. Every fast reply is one.

Now multiply it. Your manager has learned it. The three people on the project have learned it. The client has learned it. And you've learned it too, because every reply confirmed to you that the evening is a time you work, and the wonder in chapter 11 grew on that. That's the class. It's everyone who now expects you at nine because you were there at nine, and it was built one four-minute reply at a time, over years, without a single decision.

A dog learns that the doorbell means someone's coming, and barks at it, and keeps barking at it long after the person's inside. Nobody taught the dog on purpose. The doorbell and the arrival simply came together often enough. Your reply and the sender's message came together often enough too.

I want to be careful about what's evidence here and what's my reasoning. No study I've found has measured whether replying faster causes other people to send more out-of-hours messages. What's measured is the receiver's misjudgement of expectations, in Giurge and Bohns, and the way individual availability raises collective norms, in Mazmanian. The link between those, the idea that your reply is the thing that teaches, is my interpretation of how expectations form, and I think it's the plainest reading of both.

Here's the part that matters. If the expectation was taught, it can be untaught. The people who send at nine because you answered at nine will, if you start answering at eight in the morning, send at eight in the morning within a few weeks, because they'll have learned that too. The earlier book The work will still be there made this point about a manager's email, that expectations follow behaviour and follow it quite fast. Nobody has to be told off. Nobody has to be told anything, though chapter 18 argues that telling them makes it faster and kinder. They just need a few weeks of the new lesson.

So the four-minute reply isn't a response to an expectation. It's the source of one. That turns the whole thing round. You're not keeping up with what people want. You're deciding what people want, and you've been deciding it in favour of your own evenings being available, and you can decide otherwise from tomorrow.