The Art of Writing Short Emails
Save time — and face — with these techniques
D o you want to know how you can save an hour a day or more dealing with your email inbox? It’s pretty simple: Write short emails. Not just shorter, but short — a few sentences at max.
There actually aren’t many situations that call for novel-length emails. I would argue that there are no legitimate circumstances that call for emails longer than a paragraph or two; anything beyond that should probably be contained in an attachment rather than in the body of an email.
Do you know who writes short emails? Here’s a brief list: people who are extremely busy and don’t have the time to write out a long reply. Also, people who have carved out about 15 seconds of their valuable time to respond to an email, who you can almost guarantee will never think of a particular email again after they have sent their response.
And do you know who writes long emails? Often, its people with nothing better to do —a long email is a dead giveaway that the sender had a lot of extra time and emotional investment in the subject matter of the email, the person they’re sending the email to, or both. Look out for the people you know who continue to send you long emails and you’ll start to notice a pattern.
