Good Emails Take Time: On the Value of Thoughtful Virtual Correspondence
People have many persuasive arguments for why I’m a jerk. But the one I don’t understand is my email style.
The last four emails I sent are, in their entirety: “Thanks,” “I’ll drop them by and email you afterwards,” “No need to watch that movie. Not that great,” and “Call whenever you get back and have time.” I write like an 1880 prospector eyeing the prices at the telegraph office. Recently, after ignoring my first email, a former New York gossip columnist responded to my second with, “You’d get a lot more cooperation from me if you started out with ‘I hope this finds you well’ or another gracious greeting.” When your social graces are questioned by someone who has outed the love child of a CEO, perhaps it is time to listen.
My curtness is intended as courtesy. I am showing respect for my recipients’ time. We get blitzed with emails all day long—from friends, from colleagues, from Goldbelly telling us they’ve updated their privacy policy—and whacking through them is a task so arduous we celebrate Inbox Zero. In an age of Instagram DMs, retweets, news notifications, texts, Signal messages, Snaps, and, every so often, actual phone calls, sending an email isn’t a welcome interruption from a day of quiet contemplation. We are all day traders on the Email Exchange; our buys and sells are scheduling Google calendar events and making e-introductions. Who wants a long email? If I were emailing my wife to say goodbye before heading off to war, I’d write three paragraphs. But more than two sentences to tell a high school friend that I’m using five-gallon water jugs for my home workout seems mean.
Lockdown has given me time to examine my behaviors, now that I have so few of them. I fear the true reason I send short emails is to send an even shorter subtextual message. That message is “I am busy,” and “busy” is a euphemism for “important.”
These days, however, important has become less important. So instead of firing off a “Thanks!” hoping that the exclamation point does the work of caring, I have decided to use the one thing I’ve learned to value: time.
My first thoughts aren’t my best thoughts. Because my first thoughts are “Thanks!” My mind needs time to cycle back, to reconsider, to figure out what is really being discussed. To gain empathy. There’s a reason it takes an entire book for the Grinch’s heart to grow three sizes.
So instead of pounding out a response in minutes, I put them in my email cellar to age. I’ve even responded to texts with emails sent weeks later. Long emails with old- fashioned introductions. I am entreating people to put time aside to read my emails, each longer than this article. And if I’m going to charge that kind of price, I have to put time into my writing. I want the subtext to shift from “I’m busy” to “Our relationship is a priority.” I’ve used our discussion of home workouts to reminisce, to appreciate, to ask detailed questions about my friends’ children, whose names I sometimes have to replace with “your children” when the email search function doesn’t reveal them.
It turns out that decades of fast emails may have indeed made me a jerk. It’s going to take a while to fix that. Especially because I’m doing it one long message at a time.
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