Print Your Emails

When was the last time you printed an email? I bet if you printed the last email chain you were added to, you would be surprised how many pages it is. I did this experiment recently and found the actual content, the stuff I was supposed to read and catch up on, was 3 pages printed. What would be your reaction if someone handed you three pages to read? Probably a mix of "schedule a meeting" or "can you just summarize this please?"

Three pages is a lot!

What got me thinking about the length of emails is a recent study I saw on the advent of word processing and the exponential increase in words being "written" as compared to all human history. The results are what you would expect: we write more now, by many factors, than we ever have. The real question though is: are we writing things in our daily lives (like emails) worth reading? Or more critically, are we writing things that can even be read because of their length.

It got me thinking of how I could test this.

For thousands of years, humans have communicated through pen and paper. If I wanted to tell you something, I needed to dedicate my time to write it on a piece of paper. Writing is slow, and because it is slow, we have time to think about our message. Contrast this to how often we capture surface thoughts through typing.

Next are resource constraints, i.e. paper. If I am limited by the writing space of a single page, I have to prioritize what I want to say, and how to say it, before the paper runs out. Contrast this to the infinity of writing space of say, a Google doc.

Since I myself, am running out of space as I hand wrote this article (and then typed it), let me sum all this up.

• Because of word processing, we write a lot, often capturing surface thoughts
• We expect other to read what we wrote, without realizing the real world true length of what we just wrote
• Humans have communicated for thousands of years with pen and paper
• Time, forced prioritization, and the resource constraints of hand writing a message on a piece of paper changes how we communicate that message

Seeing is believing, and I encourage you to see for yourself like I have. The next time you kick off an email, respond to an important slack message/email thread, or write a document that you expect other to read: pull out a single sheet of paper and write on that first.

We are asking others to invest their time to read what we wrote. Invest your own time to ensure you are writing something worth reading.

PS: In terms of OODA loop, this is making sure you aren't looping faster and faster trying to catch up to everyone else pushing out surface thoughts. You are retaining your initiative by slowing down, and focusing the communication cycle.