God, does email truly suck. What used to be the best way to keep in touch with friends and family has now become an annoying slog, especially our work email inboxes that are overloaded with mounds of useless garbage that we’ll never get around to responding to. Financial Times writer Simon Kuper has now proposed six ways that we can make using email a less miserable experience, although some of them will require changing the general etiquette for the medium in ways that will make it less time-consuming.
Essentially, Kuper wants us to write emails much as teenagers write text messages — short, with little to no care for grammar and spelling and highly informal. In other words, we should just use the bare minimum of words we need to get our points across and then click “send.” He also thinks that emailers should stop expecting people to actually reply to them and should be socially shunned for demanding replies. And if that still doesn’t work, he thinks users should go one step further and just stop replying to any emails.
Kuper’s other recommendations for making email better involve keeping your email address private, which doesn’t do much good if it’s your business email and available on the company’s website, and petitioning your boss to let you ignore all emails received after 6 p.m. every night.
While Kuper’s recommendations are certainly interesting, they also seem somewhat futile since most of them involve getting other people to change their behavior. While this might work around the edges, it probably still won’t be enough to stop email from being a giant time suck in our daily lives.
At any rate, be sure to check out all of Kuper’s six ideas by clicking the source link below.
