Weekend Reflections #16 | The Answer Window

There's an old joke that the length of a minute depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on.

I'm thinking a lot about how much this difference has an impact on our day-to-day lives.

I'm usually a person who tends to answer immediately. I have this urge to not let time pass by.

But maybe this is exactly the trap.

Assume you write a post. Maybe you close the laptop, go do something else, come back one day later and check. Read. Answer.

I do not.

If five minutes pass without a reaction, I start thinking: nobody liked it. Nobody saw it. Nobody agrees.

And this goes both ways.

If I see something I want to comment on, but it was posted two days before, I usually skip it. Like I lost the "answer window". The allowed time to answer has passed.

And this happens with almost any kind of interaction. An email. A telephone call. A WhatsApp message.

Maybe it really is just a different perception of time passing.

Five minutes for someone can mean "I just posted this."

Five minutes for someone else can already mean "nobody is answering."

Two days can mean "I just saw your post."

Or it can mean "far too late to comment now."

Maybe this is individual. Maybe cultural. Maybe contextual. Probably a bit of everything.

I don't have the answers. Just new questions.

Then I discovered there is actually some research around this.

Researchers have looked at something called "response latency": how the time between a message and a reply shapes how we interpret an interaction.

And expectations seem to matter.

If someone usually answers quickly, a slower response can feel more noticeable, simply because it breaks the pattern we have become used to.

Which creates a strange consequence.

The speed at which I interact is already a signal.

If people know that I answer immediately, what will they think when I don't?

Nothing, perhaps.

But perhaps I have unintentionally created an expectation. By being fast all the time, I changed what "normal" means when interacting with me.

Research on non-urgent work email also suggests that we tend to overestimate how quickly the sender expects us to respond.

Which makes me wonder how many of these "answer windows" actually exist.

Maybe a lot of them exist only in our heads.

And there is AI.

AI is quick. It answers immediately. There is basically no waiting.

If more and more of the interactions around us happen with almost no waiting time at all, will this also change what we perceive as a normal response time?

Will we start feeling slow just because everything around us became faster?

I don't know if this will happen.

But maybe AI will not only make things faster. Maybe it will make waiting feel slower.

And maybe I'm doing all of this for another reason entirely.

Cognitive load.

I tend to get things out of the way so I don't have to keep carrying them in my head. Answer the email. Send the message. Make the call. Done. One thing less sitting somewhere in my head.

So the sooner, the better.

Maybe my relationship with time is actually a relationship with open loops.

Maybe I don't need the other person to answer immediately.

Maybe I just need the interaction to feel finished.

Maybe there are two clocks. The social clock tells me I am replying too late. The cognitive one tells me the interaction is still unfinished.

Not sure.

But I'm going to try something: noticing the moment when five minutes become "too long", or when two days become "too late", and asking myself a simple question.

According to whose clock?