Last month I had a dispute with my CPA about the fact that I kept sending her emails and she would never respond. Granted, we had already established that I wanted to extend our income tax returns due to our travel schedule, but I didn’t know if she had received the emails that followed that decision.
One thing led to another and I found out that my 2009 docs had not been received by her. Talk about a stressful situation! We were thankfully able to track down the missing documents—which of course contained all of our private financial information—but the situation could have been avoided if my CPA had taken the time to simply respond to my messages and confirm the information.
The lesson: Even if you are insanely busy and assume you know what the sender is saying in his or her email, take two minutes to read it and respond, even if you just say “received.” If you don’t have a second when you first receive the email, make sure you mark it as “unread” so you can get back to it when you have more time. You can even flag it if you have to.
It’s all about “mindfulness,” which is to never put anyone in a compromising position. Civility is lacking in the world these days and we need to bring it back. We need to respect others and treat them as we want to be treated. Small things like sending a three-word sentence to someone will save so much stress and annoyance! And besides—now that everyone has iPhones, PDAs, iPads and mobiles with web access, there’s no excuse to not be in touch!