Groupon CEO Andrew Mason came up with a great idea the other day that has nothing to do with daily deals. Mason, who' was ousted after his company reported poor results in the fourth quarter, tweeted a proposal that would have profound implications for anyone struggling to reach Inbox Zero nirvana:
As Business Insider has subsequently reported, a software engineer at the company took the challenge and wrote a script to apply the 50-words-and-under limit to Gmail.
When compared to Twitter's 140-character limit, this is actually quite generous. Since that quota evens out to about 25 words, you would now have double the amount to say in an email than what you might tweet. As Twitter users well know, crafting tweets can be tricky, but you can pretty much get across whatever you need to say. With 50 words, you would have no excuse.
Enforcing discipline would improve the content of most emails. There's a timeworn case to be made that shorter is better. For instance, Mark Twain once apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a short one. Shakespeare also opined (via Polonius in Hamlet) that "brevity is the soul of wit." In addition, you would also automatically screen out a lot of spam and, for us journalists, press releases. Just like in Twitter, if a company wanted to alert you about a press release, they could send a sentence with a link, rather than the whole enchilada.
Despite the evidence, though, not everyone is convinced this is a good idea. Susan Etlinger, an analyst with the Altimeter Group, says that a 50-word limit is "solving the wrong problem." In her view, the issue with emails isn't their length but their sheer number. "You have to mentally triage — read and respond, ignore — that takes a lot of mental energy," she says. She also thinks that unless there was an industry-wide agreement on a 50-word length, adherence to the restriction would be spotty at best.
Joshua Lyman, an independent tech consultant, says that forcing shorter emails might lead to a "chat-like environment" where you'd get three emails instead of one. "It could certainly not help," he says. Lyman says that a word limit would, however, "make people think about their emails."
Despite the potential downsides, I think a word limit is worth a try. Email has become a scourge. Apps like Mailbox are a step in the right direction, but we need to do the equivalent of wiring our jaws shut at this point. A diet of 50 words or less will keep our inboxes lean and mean, especially if we've already set up a filter for those bloated missives from Groupon.
Image courtesy of Flickr, TechCrunch
View the Original article
