tl;dr: Some one was dumb & used a good idea to excuse being lazy. It gave me an idea. I created a micro site to share simple rules for better email!

Sentenc.es is a novel idea to have more meaningful email communication by applying a discipline to how you respond. The suggestion it offers, is to limit your responses to  certain number of sentences or less. They have pages for two, three, four and five sentence lengths.

Picture from Intersection Consulting

I am all for ideas to improve email – I GET A LOT OF IT, sometimes it feels like I am drowning in it. I use unroll.me and a million filters in my email client to try and cope. I also love the idea senten.ce offers of being disciplined to responding, but there is a problem.

The problem is people (when isn’t it). This was highlighted for me recently when I questioned someone on why their emails were short, rude & insulting. Their answer “You misunderstood my tone”. When pushed further it turns out the reason he couldn’t craft his emails to get the tone right, was because he blindly followed the three sentences rule.

Picture from darkuncle

The mistake made here, which is made not only with this idea but with many, is to be too focused on being disciplined that you lose sight of the bigger picture. Another place I’ve seen this is with scrum, where they “do it by the book” even when they are hurting because of it. Agile is helping with scrum, but what can we do for the “senten.ce sheep”?

The solution!

I decided to make a micro site called Rules for better mail, which like senten.ce, has what I think are better rules. Share it, put it at the bottom of your emails, ignore it, contribute to it or what ever you feel like, I am not your mom – you don’t need to listen to me.