Today the ABR blog is helping you “stay in the know” by sharing an article that we found interesting. We think you will too.
Huffington Post published an article last month titled “The 1 Email Successful People Never Send.” It grabbed my attention because (a) I’m interested in trends in business communication, and (b) I want to be successful, so I had to know whether I am an offender sending that one email!
As it turns out, I am guilty. The article’s author, Alexis Kleinman, opens the article with: “Want to get ahead? Emulate the super-successful and never send a long email.”
Kleinman goes on to describe how Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was known for sending very brief emails during his time as CEO; and that Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO and founder, doesn’t send long emails either. The article also describes a movement called “five.sentenc.es,” which aims to convince people to treat email like SMS text messages and keep them to five sentences or fewer.
Kleinman ends the article with three key tips:
- People don’t need as much background information as you think they do. It might seem essential to you, but it actually seems superfluous to the email recipient.
- Don’t waste your subject line. Give the recipient an idea of what the email contains and a good reason to click on it.
- Just because your email is short, that doesn’t mean it has to be rude.
I’m all for tip #2, but I’m not so sure about #1. Email messages are NOT text messages and they shouldn’t be treated as such. I confess that I am guilty of the occasional lengthy email (just ask my co-workers), but I also believe that context counts. Depending on the topic and the audience, sometimes it just isn’t professional or feasible to limit an email to five sentences.
Rather than removing important information from a longer email, I use formatting to make the message palatable. I try to chunk text into short paragraphs, which makes it more inviting to read. Another strategy is to use (but don’t overuse!) bold, bullets, lists, etc. to highlight and pull out key messages, often making the email easier for the reader to scan.
I agree with Kleinman’s third tip above, but I think it can be tricky to convey emotion in an email—which is certainly one of its biggest drawbacks when you compare it to in-person or phone communication. On occasion I have received very brief emails that felt brusque to me, even though the sender likely did not intend that. The article suggests combatting this by injecting “a friendly, cheery note” into short messages. But if that’s not your style, perhaps simply including a greeting and salutation in every email could help convey that you aren’t being rude, just concise.
One final note: the way the article is written seems to assert that people are more successful because they write short emails. But actually, these folks write short emails because they’re busy being successful. This is an important distinction. Think about what happens when you turn it around: if a customer service rep or a sales person responded to a customer concern with a one- or two-sentence response (as some CEOs and high-level executives have been known to do), I doubt the customer would be pleased. In fact, that employee might not have a job for very long!
What do you think? Should we ALWAYS limit our business emails to a few sentences? Or is it important to occasionally elaborate?
