3 Reasons to Wait to Respond

Today, I’d like to share a project manager pro tip with you…I didn’t learn it until year 6 or so, and there’s no reason you need to wait that long.

Here it is:

Don’t always respond to everyone right away.

What?? Why not? Isn’t it a huge part of my job to communicate and manage communications on my projects? Isn’t that how I add value to the team? Shouldn’t I want to be helpful?

The answer to all of those questions is, of course, yes. I’m not at all suggesting you neglect people who need your project expertise. But when you wait to respond to some communications for strategic reasons, there can be multiple benefits.

I learned this during a particularly busy time in my job when we were down a staff member and I had extra projects on my plate. I had to be unusually rigorous in managing my own work, along with accepting how behind I typically still was at the end of a workday. As a result, people sometimes asked for my help, and I just wasn’t able to weigh in on their problem in a timely fashion.

And…guess what? While they were waiting for me, some of these people solved their own problem.

During the same period, I reached out to my boss for advice via instant message more often than usual. And in quite a few of those instances I found that just by typing out my problem, I’d created the space in my brain to find my own answer before she had a chance to help. In reflecting on this with her later, she noted that she sometimes does this on purpose as a manager. Because when she doesn’t respond right away, she’s giving people a chance to find their own answer.

These two experiences in the same period of time cemented ‘strategically waiting to respond’ as a tool in my project manager toolbox.

Here are some situations when it’s been especially helpful:

1. Empowering team members

Even if I have the answer to a question, sometimes it helps to ask myself, “Am I the best person to answer?” 

Let’s say a coworker sends an email to multiple people, including me. If I have the answer, but am not the best person to respond based on my role, I might wait a day or two to give that better-fit person a chance to answer first. If they’re the expert, I really shouldn’t talk over them anyway.

This is especially important when I am training or supporting another project manager. If I am copied on the email as an FYI but it is really the other project manager’s project, it is best to let them try to answer first. Like in a game of improv, I can jump in to “yes-and” their response with more detail if needed. It also never hurts to give someone the space they need to figure out when they need to ask me for help.

This same principle can apply in meetings. If a question is asked, and I think someone else should answer, I will wait a few extra seconds before I weigh in. People love to fill silence. If you know this and can harness that energy, it might be the nudge someone needs to speak up. Alternatively, instead of answering, I might overtly tee up the other person: “Lisa, would you like to fill us in on that?”

2. Setting realistic expectations of your response time

In the busy period I described near the beginning of this post, when I first discovered this lesson about strategically waiting to respond, I also thought about a particularly knowledgeable coworker who I often ask for help, information, or context. While she’s very competent, I realized her competence alone isn’t why I reach out to her so often. It’s also because she regularly responds to questions in less than a minute.

To this day, I appreciate her help very much, but I suspect her response time is one of the reasons she seems particularly busy compared to other coworkers. People get the instant gratification of her help, so they reach out to her more often. She’s one of those people whose workload I look at and say, “I don’t know how you do it.”

When you manage your projects in a way that is sustainable for you, you can continue to bring value to your company and career over a long period of time, rather than letting burnout cut your contributions short. 

So start with this question: What response time balances the needs of your team and stakeholders with a workload that’s sustainable for you? You can train people on when to expect a response from you simply by implementing specific response times. Or you can go the extra mile by setting expectations directly: “Thanks for reaching out! I have some urgent needs to address today, but I can get back to you on that tomorrow.”

Finding this balance is an art that takes practice to master, but it’s a powerful force to leverage for both your projects and your sanity.

3. Prioritizing YOUR workload first

As a project manager, you are likely bombarded with communications all day long. And you’re probably regularly finding yourself looking for new ways to manage and prioritize your work. When you are deciding what needs to happen now and what can wait, deprioritizing questions you know someone else can answer—or that you believe the asker can address themselves–is a reasonable decision to make.

If you manage a high volume of projects, you might find your job feels like “keeping a cap on the chaos,” as my coworker and mentor Elizabeth used to say. So you focus on the project issues that need you the most and let the other projects hum along in a mostly correct direction. It’s a practical reality that any professional sometimes needs to face. You wait to respond because you have to, and you pick your priorities based on what’s most likely to keep succeeding—or not—without you.

When none of the three factors above apply to your situation, responding as soon as you reasonably can is probably still the best thing to do. As a project leader, ensuring clear, accurate, and efficient communication is a major part of your role. But delayed response time can be the breath you need in the midst of your work chaos. Don’t hesitate to take it!