Sending emails in the early morning hours, waking people up?
Because my schedule is very unstructured due to work, I tend to email at almost all times of the day, including the early morning hours when most people should be sleeping.
Then, at 5 in the morning, someone saw me compose an email on my Blackberry, and warned me not to send it out. I asked, "Why?" She said it's because more and more people are receiving emails on their Blackberries and other smartphones and early-morning emails will wake them up from their sleep, and they are becoming more annoyed about being awakened by unimportant emails that are not emergencies. It would reflect badly on me if I keep sending emails in the wee hours.
I was very surprised to hear that, because I would think that people would just turn off their PDA's or at least enable them to be "phone only" where phone calls are the only ones that audible or vibrate, while emails are on quiet mode.
The tech-savvy will know how to do this, but most people won't know how to set it up (and most won't have the patience or won't care).
Maybe because I work too hard or don't listen to people, but I just hadn't heard of this issue before. Because of the increasing use of Blackberries and other smartphones, is there a new form of etiquette about when to send emails? Do I no longer send emails to people during early mornings in their time zones? I searched on crackberry and also googled on the Internet for any issues on this topic, but nothing came up, so I imagine it's something that could be a bigger issue going forward.
Thought I'd ask.