February 5, 2025

Short emails are a good thing

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There may be rare circumstances where a flowery email is appropriate, but 99% of the time you’re better off just getting to the point. Thanks to AI, many people are writing a short email and then using AI to unnecessarily expand it to make it more “professional”.

On the receiving side, more and more people are using AI to “summarize this email into bullet points”. Its reminds of this comic from Tom Fishburne, which is becoming shockingly accurate.

The end result is wasted effort on both sides, and likely a degree of miscommunication. It’s kind of like using Google Translate to translate from text from English to German, and then translate it back again. It’s likely going to have the same overall sentiment, but some things may get lost in translation.

Don’t be curt with your colleagues, but don’t feel the need to make emails unnecessarily long. Share what you need and move on. Short emails can be a great thing.

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