For the New Year, One Elegant Email Solution

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One of the most common office New Year’s resolutions has to be getting email under control. With the flood of messages into our inboxes taking up more and more of the average office worker’s time, it’s only sensible to commit to digging out from the deluge and setting up a system to stop email from eroding your productivity.

But how do you do it? Writing for blog Productive Flourishing, Charlie Gilkey tells how he faced off against his email problem and came out victorious. His strategy boiled down to a simple principle: write shorter emails. But how did he manage to trim his word count without coming off as brusque and offending people? Gilkey explains the conundrum:

I had long known about the 5 sentences policy and found it to be insensitive, dehumanizing, and dissonant with the way I wanted to interact with people. That said, I knew the end the rule was advancing -�C effective communication. In case you��ve never seen it, here��s the policy: five.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less. It��s that simple.

The fact of the matter was that I wanted to get better about sending emails because I wanted to help people…. What I find so dehumanizing about the 5 sentences policy is that it doesn��t address the fact that my interactions with people are about more than information. Furthermore, 5 sentences don��t cut it for much of what I do �C- sometimes it works, other times it doesn��t.

After pondering the problem and tinkering with his system, Gilkey came up with an elegant solution. Simply tell people he cared.

I created a hidden page on this website, said what I had to say, and added this to my signature: ��If this email is brief, it��s because I care: http://bit.ly/tinyemail�� (If you click the link, you��ll see what I wrote.)

I like that particular line because it applies to every email. If it��s a longer response, it��s because it needed to be. If it��s a shorter response, it��s because it didn��t need to be any longer. By the way, it��s harder to write a short response than it is a longer one �C- it requires a good bit of self-trust and confidence.

He says he’s gotten great feedback on the technique (despite a few dissenters) and has gotten down the time he spends on emails greatly. Do you think the technique might work for you? If so, Gilkey’s lengthy post goes into much greater detail and is definitely worth a read.

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