An e-mail charter will not get our lives back

Programming inboxes to accept brief e-mails only could help tackle the daily avalanche

EVERYONE AGREES that we spend too much of our lives e-mailing. Everyone agrees that the answer is to write fewer, shorter, clearer messages. Everyone has known this for years. Yet instead of getting better, the problem goes on getting worse.

Earlier this month, Chris Anderson, “curator” of the TED conferences, gave a call to arms on his blog. What we need, he said, is an e-mail charter, and then we’ll get our lives back. He provided 16 principles and invited the crowd to comment. On the TED website, on Twitter and on Facebook the crowd roared its approval: Love it! Great stuff! Awesome post!! Genius!

Some of Mr Anderson’s principles strike me as if not exactly the work of a genius, then at least the work of a perfectly sensible person. Principle 1 says respect the recipient’s time – which is hard to argue with. Other principles include: don’t e-mail when angry; don’t e-mail in capital letters; don’t copy people unless necessary; don’t have subject lines that say “re:re:re” or “Hello from me!”

Some of the others are less sensible. He outlaws messages that simply say “thanks” – on the grounds they waste the recipient’s time. But surely it’s better to squander a nanosecond reading this one word than fretting for hours over whether your message has been read or not?

Mr Anderson also turns out to have an unfortunate affection for personalised signatures, emoticons and acronyms. He likes short e-mails written in the subject line followed by EOM (end of message), and messages that end: NNTR – no need to reply. These little initials sap one’s spirits, especially NNTR; in my experience the people who say “don’t reply” are the people who are longing for you to write back on the double.

His final rule is to turn off the computer sometimes. This really is a stroke of genius, though I have seldom met anyone who ever manages to follow it. He suggests sending an automated reply: “Thank you for your note. As a personal commitment to me and my family’s mental health, I now do e-mail only on Wednesdays. I’ll reply to as many as I can next Wednesday. Thanks for writing. Don’t forget to smell the roses.”

If anyone clogged up my inbox with such self-righteousness, it would indeed stem the tide of e-mail: I would excommunicate them at once. Yet the real problem with the charter isn’t that half the rules are duds. Neither is it that 16 principles are too many to remember. It is that the very idea of an e-mail charter is all wrong. Guidelines only work when all participants are both willing and able to follow them.

In the case of e-mails, people may agree to the charter in theory, but I very much doubt if they will manage to change their bad habits. The comments on the TED website support such pessimism – people cheerfully write “awesome!!” but then undermine their support with a long, incoherent commentary.

There is a reason for such long-windedness. Writing any old thing is always a lot easier than thinking first about what it is you are trying to say. Thinking lucidly is a painful process and is not something that anyone is going to start doing simply because they have signed up to a charter.

To get around this natural tendency to waffle, something stronger is called for. My alternative would not ask senders to change voluntarily but would instead give an absolute power of veto to recipients. They would all take the law into their hands and block any message written in a way that failed to please them.

The easiest way to do this would be to program inboxes only to accept brief e-mails. Anyone sending me a rambling one would get an automatic notification saying: “Your e-mail was too long. Lucy Kellaway’s inbox will only accept messages of up to 100 words. The remainder of your message is in her trash folder.

When enough people do this (as they surely would) everyone would be forced to write differently. People have learnt to be succinct on Twitter, and now they would learn again on e-mail. Their minds would be compelled to focus.

Other filters could also be used. I might be inclined to block senders who do not know their it’s from their its. Or senders who use emoticons. Above all I would block anyone who said “reach out” or “going forward”. Each time the sender would be notified and the reason given.

The more I think of it, the more I think this is the best idea I have ever had. It would wipe the world of jargon, would raise standards of literacy and would give all of us our lives back.– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011