Crafting Email is the Bane of My Existence

I struggle with sending emails. As a software developer I like precision, clean code, and getting the job done with as little “fluff” as possible. While I love email because I don’t have to talk to the person on the other end (because I’m an introvert) I want the email to be perfect (because I’m a bit of a perfectionist) before it goes out. Hours later the collision of software developer and perfectionist means that I have a reasonably acceptable email that may or may not gain an answer in return.

I recently found an article entitled “Why Am I So Terrible At Email?” by Daniel Cooper over on Engadget that describes exactly how I feel about email most days. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

I wish that I could email “like a boss,” that short, ultra-declarative sentences that apparently open up your life to new possibilities. I wish that, in the style of BuzzFeed’s Katie Notopoulos, I could condense all of my emailing down to just a few seconds each day. It would be nice if things were just a little simpler, maybe if the whole world was on Slack, I could just bother them on there instead.

The article provides some tips for improving your email form. I’ll be trying them out over the next couple of weeks. I may not be emailing “like a boss” after my experiment but I hope to cut down on the time I spend on the task. Be sure to check out the article.