Email sympathy – writing shorter emails

Like lots of other people, a massive part of my work life is spent dealing with emails. For me it is not unusual to deal with over 150 emails in a day – 50 outgoing, 100 incoming – but for others I know it can be much, much more.

If I look at my email habits, I can tell you that the biggest factor effecting how likely I am to read and process an email is how long it is. Emails more than two or three paragraphs long max bore me, and I tend not to read past sentence two unless I really want to. This means I need to be either interested or feel responsible for the outcome of the email by sentence two.

There are plenty of other blogs and sites that will tell you about email etiquette and how to reach inbox zero, but if you want to improve the usefulness of your emails to other people, then please make them shorter.

I am now in the habit of reviewing my own emails before I send them out, and I try to make them at least 2-3 sentences shorter.

The benefits? Not only will forcing yourself to compress your email into fewer sentences force you fully think through what you want to say or what you are asking for, but the message will come across much clearer when it is not buried in “fluff”, and the person you are writing to is much more likely to understand what you’re asking and even do what you’d like them to do.

The risk is that you may come across as being too “direct”, which many people don’t respond to all that well. I certainly wouldn’t recommend removing all the pleasantries, but your request for more resources on the project because of slipping timelines is unlikely to be heard if it is buried in between a weekend report and an enquiry about that local sporting team.

When you’re about to hit the “Send” button on your next email, stop to think if you can make it shorter. Your readers will thank you for it – if they make it past sentence two.