Another brief one tonight, as the odd spinning head hasn’t completely stopped spinning, although it’s slowed somewhat - it’s now more of a waltz than a polka.
Anyway, since it’s a minimal week, what could be more minimal than Mike Davidson’s Five-Sentence Email solution. It’s simple: every single email you send must be five sentences or less.
Davidson came to this idea because of email overload - there’s too much of it, and each email in your Inbox whines annoyingly at you until it’s buried beneath a pile of newer, also whining, emails. All those emails demand responses. All those emails that you want to send to people demand composition. They all tie up space in your brain, until the only thought you’re capable of thinking is “I wish I was at home in bed”.
So Davidson imposed some self-discipline, and pretty soon found that, instead of just replying to the ones that were easiest to reply (and we all know that temptation), he was getting through all of them. All using Five-Sentence-Fu.
For the purists, yes, we do understand that occasionally one must use more than five sentences. But a lot of the time, if we really try, we can trim and purge and whittle relentlessly, until eventually we’ve got the habit of terse emails.
So consider investing a month of habit-building in Five-Sentence-Fu, and include the five.sentenc.es link in your emails to gently point out to people why you’re doing it. Who knows, it might become the next internet tradition.