A devious solution to email overload

A friend pointed me to a post  that offered a simple and highly unusual solution to email overload: change the signature block on your desktop email client to read “Sent from my iPhone”.

The idea, the writer explained, is that this will make you “feel more comfortable offering short, direct, and concise replies to incoming emails, thus improving your email productivity and freeing up time to do other more important work”.

This is certainly devious, is probably effective, and the logic seems unassailable… but it raises a question: why would you need it? Surely you can send “short, direct, and concise replies to incoming emails” without this sneaky ploy? What is going on here?

What are they afraid of?

What is going on – the underlying assumption of that post – is that many users are afraid to send too brief replies. And we should ask ourselves, why is this the case?

It’s not like anyone gets hurt by shorter emails. On the contrary: the sender saves time, but the recipient also saves time – and time is equally precious to both of them! Why should you step with such care before doing your recipient a favor?

Obviously, there is an expectation at play here, that messages should not be too brief. I can only surmise this derives from a long gone time when etiquette demanded ornate verbosity in handwritten letters, complete with honorific embellishments and inked flourishes. In that context, writing too curtly would indeed offend. But times have changed so much – isn’t it time to change the expectation?

How you can get away with being brief

If you’re still afraid, here are some ideas for how to write with brevity and get away with it safely.

• Align expectations with each recipient. You can do this in your sig. Take the famous http://five.sentenc.es/ policy… once your sig states in a cheerful way why you write briefly, no one can take offense.
• Align expectations across your group. If you manage people, negotiate a “group contract” with them that messages should be short. If you’re not a manager, try to get your boss to do it. I’ve seen it done – we actually had a senior manager at Intel who managed a huge traffic reduction by decreeing that no report submitted to him may exceed half a page… The point being, once it’s agreed by everyone that short is OK, it becomes – well – OK!
• Write clear messages. The shorter the message, the more important the clarity, since there is no repetition to remove ambiguity; and if the message is crystal-clear, the expectation for more words is reduced. Writing good short messages is an art – as I once mentioned, Blaise Pascal once wrote, “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter”. Still, once you talk SMS-like short, it’s not all that time-comsuming to do it right. And it saves the subsequent ping-pong of clarification messages.
• Be a senior manager. After all, where a junior employee offends, a VP role models… As a senior manager you can afford to be brief, and many of them are, if only because they have such a huge email load to react to.
• Be a Gen Y. Word is, millennials couldn’t write at length if they wanted to – it’s all that TXTese… but take great care how you do it in email – many older users in your organization may not know the conventions and abbreviations.
• Just do it! With or without the above tricks, writing well-crafted but short messages will make you a better employee and a happier person. If someone ever complains, talk it out with them…

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