Personal coping strategies II

posted by Nathan Zeldes on August 25, 2007

OK, here is another strategy I’ve observed people use to cope with email overload: write very short messages in all-caps or all-lowercase. I mean, really short. A word. A sentence. Rarely, a very short paragraph.

Interestingly, I’ve observed this primarily in the emails of senior executives; more ordinary mortals don’t go that far.

So, a conundrum: what’s going on here? Why only the execs?

I can think of a number of possible explanations:

1. The explanation from Necessity: we know that execs get around 300 messages per day. Obviously they are forced to process them very fast, hence this brutal brevity.
2. The explanation from Impunity: because they are senior, these people can afford to send messages that may be perceived as rude by the recipients. They’ll get read and acted on anyway. (But one wonders, are their messages to people equal or higher in rank than themselves also this brief?)
3. The explanation from Intelligence: if they weren’t smart, they wouldn’t have made executive level; and being smart, they know it’s better to write quicker messages.
4. The Darwinian explanation: because they’d wasted less time on email, they had more time to produce results and therefore got promoted to senior management ahead of the rest…

So, can we all become executives by sending brief emails? I doubt it. But we can certainly try to keep ours mail brief, while keeping in mind that our recipients will not excuse us if too much terseness makes them uncomfortable. For us, it’s a tradeoff we must weigh carefully before clicking Send!

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tagged: email, infoglut, infomania, information overload