Increase Your Productivity 500%
January 26th, 2010 | Published in Internet, Writing | 7 Comments
Years ago a friend of mine forwarded an email to me from the editor of a popular magazine with this comment:
Isn’t it interesting that the editor—the head honcho!—of ______ would write like this!
This was the editor’s email he was referring to:
hi _____, thnx. we love Thomas too. if u want to pitch our literary editor on a review, he’s at __________…
best -tom
I remember being amused and thinking it was a symbol of our cultural and linguistic decline.
That was five years ago. Now I have a more practical perspective on his email — he was just a busy guy, trying to get as much done as possible.
I’ve been thinking about this because over the past year, and more so in the past six months, I’ve gotten very busy. Starting Rainsong Media was a big step for me professionally, and a few months later I also founded Beacon Ad Network with a partner. Add a few other projects on the side, and you have a recipe for busyness like I’d never experienced before.
So what do you do when you have a couple hundred emails to go through every few days? If you want to actually get things done, you have three options as I see it:
- Hire someone to check and respond to your email
- Let them pile up and only respond to emergencies
- Write in shorthand
Most of us do not have time to respond to a couple hundred emails with a polished response — if we did, we’d never get anything else done. And even if we hire someone to handle our emails, there will still be many to respond to ourselves.
And that’s where shorthand comes in. Instead of taking 3-10 minutes to answer an email, you can answer it in 30 seconds.
Say you dedicate 2 hours a day to email. Look at the productivity differences:
- 24 emails at 5 minutes per email (average)
- 120 emails at 1 minute per email (average)
That’s a 500% productivity increase.
There will always be emails that need thoughtful, polished responses. But most of our emails don’t — they are simply information requests that can be answered quickly in shorthand.
So shorthand isn’t a symbol of cultural decline or of lesser intellect. Let’s drop our elitist attitudes. For many of us, it’s just a sign of busyness and a desire to get things done.
January 26th, 2010 at 1:38 pm (#)
Interesting, but in the case of the editor at the top, couldn’t that message have been improved by 500% if he just used proper spelling and grammar, and kept the response just as brief?
I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition, either. For instance, I rarely use capitalization or punctuation while on IM, but always use it in email.
Do we need a sliding scale for usage?
January 26th, 2010 at 1:52 pm (#)
@Edman
It would have looked 500% better if he had taken some time to update his replacement database in Outlook. Takes little to no time and you can use all the shorthand you want and outlook will expand it for you. Not difficult. I started doing this when I began Texting and IMing more people and the speed was a good boost for me. Updated Outlook and my lingo doesn’t have to change.
January 26th, 2010 at 2:42 pm (#)
@Somewhiteguy
Wow, now that is a solution I hadn’t thought of.
Bravo.
January 26th, 2010 at 5:37 pm (#)
I’m going to disagree with this in practice.
Shorthand served a purpose, in saving one person’s time: the person writing it. All you’re doing by sending off emails this way is wasting someone else’s time. You’re assuming that the other person will be able to decipher your short hand as quickly as they would a grammatically correct email, spelled properly. Don’t make your busyness my problem and force me to solve it.
You had it correct the first time, this is very much an issue of cultural and linguistic decline. If you’re busy, that’s a good thing. Being too busy to not respond properly to a situation isn’t an excuse to sacrifice quality and standards.
January 26th, 2010 at 5:53 pm (#)
On the other hand, I may have just increased the productivity of someone else by replying with:
“will do”
instead of
“Hi Ted, thanks for your email! I have considered the task and have scheduled it to be done tomorrow morning. I’ll send you an update when it is done. In the meantime, have a great day.
Sincerely,
Josh Sowin”
* * *
How would you argue this is “an issue of cultural and linguistic decline”? What objective standards are there to measure such a claim? Is there really anything objectively wrong with typing how we talk?
January 27th, 2010 at 10:00 am (#)
Good point. :)
January 27th, 2010 at 11:42 am (#)
Omit needless words applies to emails too.