Time management: should you reply as quickly as everyone else?
Within a team, an immediate reply is visible; the work postponed to produce it is much less so. The management question is precise: should people organise their time around their colleagues’ response speed, or around an explicitly agreed service timeframe?
What the literature establishes
Robert B. Cialdini, Raymond R. Reno and Carl A. Kallgren (1990, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) distinguish descriptive norms, which indicate what others do, from injunctive norms, which indicate what others approve of. Their experiments on littering show that these influences depend in particular on which norm is made salient in the situation. Applied cautiously to scheduling, this distinction suggests that “my colleagues reply quickly” should not be confused with “my team requires a quick reply”.
When people misread one another’s expectations
Deborah A. Prentice and Dale T. Miller (1993, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) studied pluralistic ignorance in relation to alcohol use on a university campus. Students reported being less comfortable with drinking practices than they believed other students were. This finding suggests a hypothesis to test, rather than an established fact about businesses: people might conform to a responsiveness requirement that they mistakenly attribute to the group.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that simply allowing slower replies would solve the problem. These studies support neither that general rule nor a universal response time: some requests genuinely determine whether a client or colleague can move forward. The useful distinction is between the response time needed to deliver a service and the speed people imitate to appear available. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot decide
These studies concern neither workplace messaging nor businesses in Ticino, so they do not measure how much time clarifying expectations might recover. Message timestamps are insufficient too: a quick reply may reflect temporary availability rather than an obligation. Examining the practice requires comparing the timeframe assumed by the recipient with the timeframe actually expected by the sender, while distinguishing acknowledgement from a full reply.
A practical check in Lugano
Within SHR’s “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme, an exercise applicable in Lugano would involve selecting a sample of non-urgent internal requests over two weeks in a bank, fashion business, trading company or Italian-speaking family SME. Before any clarification, senders and recipients would separately record, in Italian if that is their working language, the expected and assumed timeframes for a full reply. The measure would be the proportion of requests for which recipients believe they must reply earlier than senders actually expect, excluding regulatory or contractual deadlines. The team could then make its response timeframes explicit and repeat the measurement: a reduction in this gap would indicate better-aligned expectations, without itself proving a productivity gain. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Lugano, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Lugano
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