Why is it so hard to reply to emails?

I am sure many of the readers have had the incredible frustration of waiting for responses to emails that you thought deserved and needed one. Sometimes they never come and other times they come much later than when they had to. So why are we, the advanced human race, so bad at doing something so simple?.Long long agoLong before email, long before mail of any sort, the only way for people to communicate was in person. The really rich folks had messengers and the really smart ones had pigeons but for much of the human race, it was face to face communication. It worked. People figured things out faster.A few decades after Graham Bell made his now historic phone call, the telephone started permeating across the world. By the latter half of the 20th century, phone communication was  available for much of the civilized and free world. People communicated better, faster and much more than before. And things were great.And then cellphones and Internet happened.Cell Phones and InternetThe arc of constantly improving communications hit its peak (ironically also signaling the beginning of the end) with the advent of cellphones. Over the last 15 years, cellphone use has exploded across the world. The cost of communicating across the world has come down drastically. Everyone has a cellphone or aspires to get one. But the cellphone also brought with it the ability to know and thus screen the caller. So people could reach others anytime anyplace but also choose to disregard calls. Even with this, people responded immediately for the most part.And then email arrived. To me, the biggest contribution of Internet is email communication. Nothing has been more pivotal. We can now reach people across the globe, anytime, anyplace via email. And email can be archived and retrieved not to mention forwarded and shared. It is truly revolutionary. It should and to a great degree has served in bringing the world closer and faster. But it has also brought out the worst in us.The large Inbox with 2000 unread messagesIn a few years since the arrival of email, we are now in an era of near unlimited sized Inboxes, multiple free accounts, very little intrusive spam (thanks to fantastic spam filters), email on the go on smartphones. But we are also in an era of dozens of unread emails sitting in our inbox and a remarkable lethargy in taking a few seconds to type a response to an email.My dad has this old school habit of acknowledging every single email I have ever written to him with atleast an "Ok". Yep, thats the entire text of his response to hundreds of my emails. But it is reassuring to know that he has read what I had to tell him. But we have tons of friends, family and acquaintances with 24 hr access to email, not necessarily jobs that require any or much of that 24 hours, yet not the habit to respond to emails. It is a shame really because relationships are by nature bigger than emails. They are supposed to be designed to make things better, get people closer. Not the opposite.The ExcusesEmail procrastinators have a bevy of readymade responses that most of us are used to now. Some of the common ones are:1. Things are crazy at work - Sure. Does it imply that I have nothing to do but to send emails?2. I meant to respond but got diverted into something urgent - Yes. And someone is paying me a lot of money to focus on sending emails and nothing else to distract from it.3. It got lost in the thread - This is the safest excuse given that the uber-popular gmail does have a way of masking earlier emails. But that only happens for emails in groups. What about direct emails- unthreaded by responses?4. I wasnt sure of the response until certain other thing(s) happened - Agreed. But it warrants a reply saying, "Let me figure things out and get back to you". It took me about 5 seconds to type that out here. I clocked it.5. I am bad at responding to emails - Advance apology does nothing to take away from the fact that it reflects poorly on you and how much you value the sender's words and time. And trust me, the sender feels that you lack basic email etiquette and communication skills.So what does it say about usI find older people of my dad's generation to be remarkably good at responding to emails. Not just him but that entire generation. They still believe in the sanctity and value of acknowledgment. The current and coming generations (mine included) are the worst of the breed. We suck at time management and conveniently blame our work for our procrastination. We find it easy to spend hours on social networks but incredibly hard to spend 5 minutes responding to emails. We have learnt to abuse something precious. We take things for granted and expect everyone to just understand. And we dont even feel bad doing so. Thats the worst part of it all. We assume that what we do is perfectly acceptable. And therein lies the rub.Can it be fixed?Sure. If we admit to the problem, it can definitely be fixed. Most email services and clients offer simple tools for such purposes. We can read emails and mark them as unread afterwards to remind us to attend to it. We can assign tasks to emails so that there will be reminders. We can schedule 10 minutes in our calendar every day to get back to emails that deserve attention. We can do a lot of things. But to start with, let us get it into our psyche that it matters. Much more than we think.There is still hope. But not much of it. Soon people will stop responding to emails. Simply because we didnt respond to theirs. And then we will start taking steps backwards- to phones and maybe someday back to only face to face communication. Awesome as it sounds, its hard. Think about it. If we cant make 5 minutes to respond to emails how are we going to make an hour to meet and talk?