Vic was a superb boss — his response time on email was under 5 minutes …

Exit interview: Jaiku's Jyri Engeström - (37signals)

Five minutes! That's definitely impressive, if your job is to be responsive to email.

Vic may very well be a superb boss, but responding to email quickly is an incredibly poor way to gauge your boss's performance. The boss should be providing a vision, communicating strategy to the team, making sure that everyone is working towards shared goals. Sure, they might also be dealing with discontent or malcontents, putting out fires, or keeping an eye on the stock price, but if they're sitting around waiting for your email to come in so they can respond to it quickly, they're probably not doing the important stuff.

Seems email to my twofishcreative.com email address has been failing for at least the last few days. All is now fixed, and I have access to the backlog, but if you've sent me something that you think I should have responded to, please resend. Thanks to AndyC for bringing it to my attention.

I have split myself into too many pieces. I need to consolidate.

Writing an email is like writing an article. Only quote the relevant parts, interspersing your new remarks between the quoted passages. Don’t quote anything at all from the original message if you don’t have to.

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