A Low-Fi Solution to E-Mail Overload: Sentenc.es

I’ve written about e-mail overload issues in the past, and today I’m presenting what I believe is a simple, low-fi solution: sentenc.es.

In a nutshell, I have two issues with e-mail:

More than any other medium in the world, the time commitment difference between sender and receiver is huge. For instance, if you call me on the phone and we chat for 10 minutes, that’s 10 minutes of your time and 10 minutes of my time. If you write me a handwritten letter and I write you one back, that’s maybe 30 minutes of your time and 30 minutes of my time. If we exchange text messages, that’s 10 seconds from you and 10 seconds from me. But with email, often times the sender will ask two or three open-ended one sentence questions which elicit multi-paragraph answers. In these cases, the sender spends one minute and the receiver is asked, implicitly, to spend maybe an hour.

When faced with an inbox of 100-400 messages, I usually find myself replying to the messages which are quickest to reply to, rather than which are most important to reply to. The end result is a continual paring down of my inbox until I have 50 really important messages to reply to which are then too old to take care of.

In thinking about how to reduce this problem for me personally, I came up with a technology solution which, while cool, would require way too much buy-in from OS makers, mail application providers, and individuals. Essentially, whenever you send me an e-mail, I’d like to be able to instantly pop up a Toast or Growl message on your desktop for a few seconds with a status message of my choice. Something like “Current response time estimate: 7 days” or something more personable. I don’t like auto-responder e-mails because I’m not trying to clog up your inbox, but the ability to send you a quick, fleeting status message would be excellent. Perhaps even when you just hover over my name in the To: field before you even send the mail.

Annnnnnnyways… that solution is a bit too hi-fi and it doesn’t really solve the core problem, so instead I’m enacting a new policy today which seems potentially much more effective:

Every e-mail I send to anyone, regardless of subject or recipient, will be five sentences or less. Like a cinquain. Ideally, it would be a 160 character count like an SMS message, but since that would require an actual e-mail plug-in (viz. “work”), we’ll go with the much-easier-to-count concept of sentences instead.

In order to politely explain the systematic brevity with a similar amount of brevity, I will link to a new site I just set up called five.sentenc.es in my signature line. By ensuring that all e-mails I send out take the same amount of time to send (viz. “not a lot”), I am evening the playing field between emails and attending to many more of them in the end.



Observe the difference:

Incoming Email:

From: Joe Student

To: Mike Davidson Hi Mike. I’m a design student at PCU and I was wondering what your top ten tips for getting a great design job out of college are?

Old Policy:

From: Mike Davidson

To: Joe Student Hi Joe. Thanks so much for the email. Here is what I’d recommend: 1. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis velit arcu, pretium faucibus, dictum a, nonummy ac, augue. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Donec dignissim. Duis gravida mollis tortor. Quisque convallis sagittis elit. Curabitur laoreet tempor enim. Nunc imperdiet. Phasellus convallis consectetuer nibh. Aliquam non tortor. Maecenas a ante quis purus euismod rutrum. Praesent gravida, orci vel placerat adipiscing, nulla velit eleifend nisl, eget elementum erat lacus vitae ligula. Proin eget elit id augue pretium lacinia. In nec libero nec purus fermentum semper. Phasellus mollis cursus dolor. Nunc felis turpis, tristique et, elementum non, iaculis ut, urna. Nullam eu velit. Aliquam dapibus gravida felis. Morbi tortor. Sed egestas nonummy neque. Nulla nec nunc. 2. Duis velit arcu, pretium faucibus, dictum a, nonummy ac, augue. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Donec dignissim. Duis gravida mollis tortor. Quisque convallis sagittis elit. Curabitur laoreet tempor enim. Nunc imperdiet. Phasellus convallis consectetuer nibh. Aliquam non tortor. Maecenas a ante quis purus euismod rutrum. Praesent gravida, orci vel placerat adipiscing, nulla velit eleifend nisl, eget elementum erat lacus vitae ligula. Proin eget elit id augue pretium lacinia. In nec libero nec purus fermentum semper. Phasellus mollis cursus dolor. Nunc felis turpis, tristique et, elementum non, iaculis ut, urna. Nullam eu velit. Aliquam dapibus gravida felis. Morbi tortor. Sed egestas nonummy neque. Nulla nec nunc. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. 3. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Donec dignissim. Duis gravida mollis tortor. Quisque convallis sagittis elit. Curabitur laoreet tempor enim. Nunc imperdiet. Phasellus convallis consectetuer nibh. Aliquam non tortor. Maecenas a ante quis purus euismod rutrum. Praesent gravida, orci vel placerat adipiscing, nulla velit eleifend nisl, eget elementum erat lacus vitae ligula. Proin eget elit id augue pretium lacinia. In nec libero nec purus fermentum semper. Phasellus mollis cursus dolor. Nunc felis turpis, tristique et, elementum non, iaculis ut, urna. Nullam eu velit. Aliquam dapibus gravida felis. Morbi tortor. Sed egestas nonummy neque. Nulla nec nunc. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis velit arcu, pretium faucibus, dictum a, nonummy ac, augue. 4. Donec dignissim. Duis gravida mollis tortor. Quisque convallis sagittis elit. Curabitur laoreet tempor enim. Nunc imperdiet. Phasellus convallis consectetuer nibh. Aliquam non tortor. Maecenas a ante quis purus euismod rutrum. Praesent gravida, orci vel placerat adipiscing, nulla velit eleifend nisl, eget elementum erat lacus vitae ligula. Proin eget elit id augue pretium lacinia. In nec libero nec purus fermentum semper. Phasellus mollis cursus dolor. Nunc felis turpis, tristique et, elementum non, iaculis ut, urna. Nullam eu velit. Aliquam dapibus gravida felis. Morbi tortor. Sed egestas nonummy neque. Nulla nec nunc. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis velit arcu, pretium faucibus, dictum a, nonummy ac, augue. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. 5. Quisque convallis sagittis elit. Curabitur laoreet tempor enim. Nunc imperdiet. Phasellus convallis consectetuer nibh. Aliquam non tortor. Maecenas a ante quis purus euismod rutrum. Praesent gravida, orci vel placerat adipiscing, nulla velit eleifend nisl, eget elementum erat lacus vitae ligula. Proin eget elit id augue pretium lacinia. In nec libero nec purus fermentum semper. Phasellus mollis cursus dolor. Nunc felis turpis, tristique et, elementum non, iaculis ut, urna. Nullam eu velit. Aliquam dapibus gravida felis. Morbi tortor. Sed egestas nonummy neque. Nulla nec nunc. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis velit arcu, pretium faucibus, dictum a, nonummy ac, augue. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Donec dignissim. Duis gravida mollis tortor. 6. Curabitur laoreet tempor enim. Nunc imperdiet. Phasellus convallis consectetuer nibh. Aliquam non tortor. Maecenas a ante quis purus euismod rutrum. Praesent gravida, orci vel placerat adipiscing, nulla velit eleifend nisl, eget elementum erat lacus vitae ligula. Proin eget elit id augue pretium lacinia. In nec libero nec purus fermentum semper. Phasellus mollis cursus dolor. Nunc felis turpis, tristique et, elementum non, iaculis ut, urna. Nullam eu velit. Aliquam dapibus gravida felis. Morbi tortor. Sed egestas nonummy neque. Nulla nec nunc. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis velit arcu, pretium faucibus, dictum a, nonummy ac, augue. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Donec dignissim. Duis gravida mollis tortor. Quisque convallis sagittis elit. 7. Nunc imperdiet. Phasellus convallis consectetuer nibh. Aliquam non tortor. Maecenas a ante quis purus euismod rutrum. Praesent gravida, orci vel placerat adipiscing, nulla velit eleifend nisl, eget elementum erat lacus vitae ligula. Proin eget elit id augue pretium lacinia. In nec libero nec purus fermentum semper. Phasellus mollis cursus dolor. Nunc felis turpis, tristique et, elementum non, iaculis ut, urna. Nullam eu velit. Aliquam dapibus gravida felis. Morbi tortor. Sed egestas nonummy neque. Nulla nec nunc. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis velit arcu, pretium faucibus, dictum a, nonummy ac, augue. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Donec dignissim. Duis gravida mollis tortor. Quisque convallis sagittis elit. Curabitur laoreet tempor enim. 8. Phasellus convallis consectetuer nibh. Aliquam non tortor. Maecenas a ante quis purus euismod rutrum. Praesent gravida, orci vel placerat adipiscing, nulla velit eleifend nisl, eget elementum erat lacus vitae ligula. Proin eget elit id augue pretium lacinia. In nec libero nec purus fermentum semper. Phasellus mollis cursus dolor. Nunc felis turpis, tristique et, elementum non, iaculis ut, urna. Nullam eu velit. Aliquam dapibus gravida felis. Morbi tortor. Sed egestas nonummy neque. Nulla nec nunc. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis velit arcu, pretium faucibus, dictum a, nonummy ac, augue. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Donec dignissim. Duis gravida mollis tortor. Quisque convallis sagittis elit. Curabitur laoreet tempor enim. Nunc imperdiet. 9. Praesent gravida, orci vel placerat adipiscing, nulla velit eleifend nisl, eget elementum erat lacus vitae ligula. Proin eget elit id augue pretium lacinia. In nec libero nec purus fermentum semper. Phasellus mollis cursus dolor. Nunc felis turpis, tristique et, elementum non, iaculis ut, urna. Nullam eu velit. Aliquam dapibus gravida felis. Morbi tortor. Sed egestas nonummy neque. Nulla nec nunc. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis velit arcu, pretium faucibus, dictum a, nonummy ac, augue. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Donec dignissim. Duis gravida mollis tortor. Quisque convallis sagittis elit. Curabitur laoreet tempor enim. Nunc imperdiet. Phasellus convallis consectetuer nibh. Aliquam non tortor. Maecenas a ante quis purus euismod rutrum. 10. Proin eget elit id augue pretium lacinia. In nec libero nec purus fermentum semper. Phasellus mollis cursus dolor. Nunc felis turpis, tristique et, elementum non, iaculis ut, urna. Nullam eu velit. Aliquam dapibus gravida felis. Morbi tortor. Sed egestas nonummy neque. Nulla nec nunc. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis velit arcu, pretium faucibus, dictum a, nonummy ac, augue. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Donec dignissim. Duis gravida mollis tortor. Quisque convallis sagittis elit. Curabitur laoreet tempor enim. Nunc imperdiet. Phasellus convallis consectetuer nibh. Aliquam non tortor. Maecenas a ante quis purus euismod rutrum. Praesent gravida, orci vel placerat adipiscing, nulla velit eleifend nisl, eget elementum erat lacus vitae ligula. Best of luck, Joe! Mike

New Policy:

From: Mike Davidson

To: Joe Student Thanks very much for the e-mail, Joe.

Concentrate on your networking, your portfolio, and your friendliness.

In this business, it’s mainly about who you know and how good your stuff looks.

Take care of those two things, be a cool guy, and the rest will fall into place.

Don’t worry about how big your clients are, because nobody cares about that stuff. All the best, Mike ———————————————————————-

Q: Why is this email 5 sentences or less?

A: http://five.sentenc.es

Huge difference. What makes it all the more easy is that before I even give my response, I already know it’s going to be five sentences max, so there is little reason to procrastinate about it. And on top of that, if the occasion is right, you can even start rhyming and turn it into a legitimate cinquain.

So that’s it. The super low-fi, systematic solution to e-mail overload. It’s in beta now, but you feel free to link to five.sentenc.es in your own e-mails, or any of the sister sites at two.sentenc.es, three.sentenc.es, or four.sentenc.es depending on your desired level of brevity. Special thanks to the government of Spain for making this possible.