Rules for better email
tl;dr: Someone was dumb and 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 improve meaningful email communication by applying discipline to how you respond. The suggestion it offers is to limit your responses to a certain number of sentences—or fewer. They have pages for two, three, four, and five sentence lengths.
Picture from Intersection Consulting
I’m all for ideas to improve email—I get a lot of it. Sometimes, it feels like I’m drowning in it. I use unroll.me and a million filters in my email client to cope. I also love the idea that senten.ce offers: being disciplined in responses. But there’s a problem.
The problem, of course, is people. This was highlighted recently when I questioned someone about why their emails were short, rude, and insulting. Their response: “You misunderstood my tone.” When pressed further, it turned out he couldn’t craft his emails properly—not because he was rude, but because he blindly followed the three-sentence rule.
Picture from darkuncle
The mistake here—one made not just with this idea but with many—is focusing too much on discipline that you lose sight of the bigger picture. I’ve seen this in scrum too, where teams “do it by the book” even when it’s hurting them. Agile can help with scrum, but what about the “sentence sheep”?
The solution!
I decided to create a micro site called Rules for Better Mail, which—like senten.ce—has rules I think are better. Share it, put it at the bottom of your emails, ignore it, contribute to it, or do whatever you feel like. I’m not your mom—you don’t have to listen to me.