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The Inherent Comedy of EMail Length
Want to count the ways that e-mail is awful? Sure, let’s do that.
- It’s probably the biggest time-suck of the modern age.
- Even though it’s really easy to solve many work issues with a 5-minute convo, it always becomes a 61-person e-mail thread.
- No one understands the “push/pull” methodology.
- No one contextualizes any e-mail, so everyone thinks that everything is urgent.
- There’s somewhere between 89 billion and 135 billion e-mails sent for business every day in the world.
When you get right down to it, because of e-mails and meetings, you probably do about 590 hours of real, actual work in a given year. Ironically, you’re on the cross for a lot of that, I’m sure.
Here’s an interesting thing I’ve recently observed (by recently I mean “over the past 12 years”), and thought was deserving of a post.
I think there’s a general assumption that people don’t read e-mails of over a couple lines — I personally think Outlook and GMail and other business e-mail clients should just stop you from typing after a while — and there’s actual, documented research that Baby Boomers (who still run most businesses) hate long e-mails.
