A few months ago, a friend of mine — let’s just call him Aaron — who was a freelance marketing consultant, met with a creative director — and him, Basil — at a local design studio, to explore the possibility of doing a branding project. They had a great meeting, or so Aaron thought.

But a few weeks later, chains of emails and voicemails that Aaron left for Basil were left unanswered. Aaron, second-guessing himself, figured that he had probably done something that was unacceptable to Basil in the interview and lost the job.

This is not news to most of us, I believe. I hear different variations of probably the same problem at least a handful of times a week. One guy reaches out to another to no avail and they silently interpret it negatively.

It became clear to me during my study of Non-Verbal Communication today in the polytechnic I attend.

Non-verbal communication is not really as simple, as we see it. People misinterpret them all the time.

So I called Basil — who happened to be a friend of mine since we had worked on a few projects together — and asked about the meeting.

It went very well,

Basil told me.

I like Aaron’s proposal a lot, a great deal of fit for the project.

So why the unreturned messages and emails?

I haven’t got back to Alex,

he told me.

Because we don’t have financial approval yet. As soon as I get it, I’ll buzz him.

That’s a perfectly logical explanation. Basil had nothing new to share with Aaron, he didn’t have the green light to sub-contract Aaron yet, so why share anything at all? We’re all too busy to make a call or send an email if we don’t have to.

In fact, if you go back to my post below titled What is Social Media, you would have found out that Generation Y and Z consider the email a passé and even the Boston College stop distributing email addresses to incoming freshmen from 2009 onwards.

Although email is still a legacy in the corporate work environment, it is often being ignored and lots of people just skim through emails at most, rather then opening every single one and checking the contents.

But this also leaves Aaron in an awkward and insecure situation of knowing nothing about the progress. Should he leave more voice mails and send follow-up emails? Pinging Basil to tell him he is still interested and waiting for a response?

In the meantime, I sent an email to my cousin, Joe, a 3D Animator/Director who receives more than 500 emails a day, to ask what he thought.

If I were to get a series of emails from Aaron concerning my silences, I’d be nothing but pissed. I don’t need people to teach me how to do my job. and if I’m not answering you, pestering me wouldn’t help you, in fact, I might even stop contacting you. You gotta have patience and wait until I’m ready to answer — I can’t have your needs trump my own.

But isn’t this an issue of etiquette?

I emailed him back that evening, a day before New Year.

Shouldn’t Basil shoot Aaron a quick email telling him he’s still waiting for approval and he’ll be in touch once he gets the green light?

If I receive 500 emails a day, 200 of which are important trade emails that I’m prioritizing and answering at, say… 2AM on a holiday night — LIKE THIS EMAIL — then it’s not my obligation to write 300 more quick emails to keep people, whom I don’t need to write to, updated about the current status of any project. Just tell Aaron to wait.

That’s the reality of our work-life right there. Boom! We all get more emails than we can answer immediately. So we triage. We deal with the important ones and when time gives us a puff — maybe on a long ride or a weekend break — we catch up with less important ones, but still, there are more important things that our selfish nature wants to do for ourselves rather than for someone whom we rarely meet and know.

I have to admit that I’ve been in Aaron’s situation more often than not and I’ve made the same mistake of sending chain messages to the unresponsive person. But as I thought about Joe’s email. I realized something big:

Not a single time, did the bugging work.

Sure, they might have called me back eventually, but I never — not a single time — got the work.

If they wanted to give me the work, they would have called me back without any urge at all. Emailing every few days or leaving five voice mails doesn’t communicate your great follow-up skills, in fact, it only makes you appear needy.