Heard a VP say something at a coffee shop that changed how I look at emails

I was grabbing coffee near our office in downtown Portland last Tuesday and two suits were talking at the table next to me. One of them said, 'if your email takes more than 30 seconds to read, nobody reads it.' I started thinking about how I write my work emails and realized almost all of them are way too long. Since then I've been cutting every email down to three sentences max and people actually reply faster now. Has anyone else tried shortening their emails on purpose?

2 comments

2 Comments

skylergrant1d ago

Yeah, that VP's got a point. I started doing this a few months ago after I realized my boss was just skimming my long emails anyway. Short stuff gets way faster replies, it's like magic.

max8081d agoMost Upvoted

@skylergrant man you nailed it. A buddy of mine works in a big corporate office and he used to send these huge paragraphs to his manager. Nothing ever got done, just radio silence for days. Then he started sending three bullet points and a question mark at the end. His manager replied in like 20 minutes. It's almost TOO easy once you figure out nobody reads past the first sentence anyway.