Reply delay timer
Work out when to send a reply if you are matching the delay you were given.
How it works
Enter how long the other person took to reply, and this gives you the matching send time. That is all it does — it is a mirror, not a strategy.
The premise is a joke, and it is worth being clear about that, because there are a great many confident claims online about the psychologically optimal number of hours to wait. There is no such number. No study establishes an optimal reply delay for looking composed, and any tool that hands you one to the minute has invented it.
What research does show is how long people actually take. The largest study of email timing, covering roughly 16 billion messages, found the single most common reply time is about two minutes, with most replies arriving within a couple of hours. Reply times lengthen with the age of the sender, lengthen over the course of a working day, and are shorter on mobile. Long gaps are common and unremarkable.
So if matching someone’s cadence makes you feel better, the calculator is here. The honest version is that replying when you have something to say is fine, and nobody is timing you.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to a server, logged or stored, and the page keeps working with the network disconnected.
Common questions
- How long should you wait before replying to a message?
- There is no researched optimum. Studies describe how long people do take, not how long they should. The most common email reply time is around two minutes, and most replies arrive within a couple of hours.
- Does replying quickly make you look desperate?
- No evidence supports that as a general rule. Reply timing varies enormously with age, device, time of day and how busy someone is, which makes it a poor signal to read anything into.
- What is the average email response time?
- The most frequent reply time is about two minutes, though the distribution has a very long tail. Median times rise with the age of the sender and lengthen over the course of a working day.
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Sources
- Evolution of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload — Kooti et al., Proceedings of WWW 2015