Back in the bad old days there were really only a few ways in which you could reach someone. Anything non-urgent was post. If it it was something that needed to be read, we used fax, anything that required an immediate response would be a phone call.

Today, we use email in place of nearly all of these in many situations, but it seems we haven't adapted our use of email along with how we used the old systems. Many of us are guilty of this, myself included.

For example, when you email somebody, do you expect an immediate response?

Sometimes I do, and occasionally I'll get myself into a terrible state worrying about why a client hasn't emailed me back on some important issue. Sometimes it might take them a couple of days to get back to me, maybe because they've been out of the office.