2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44
Phil Simon, author of Message Not Received, offers a new way to combat email congestion. He called it the rule of three letters and believes that with it you can reduce your mailing time.
How much time do you spend on mail? A 2012 McKinsey Global Institute study found that white-collar workers in the office devote 28% of their time to mail. It seemed that with the advent of instant messengers, mail should fade into the background. However, its influence on our lives is only increasing. If nothing changes, in a few years the number of inbox messages will double. But I repeat once again: if nothing changes.
There are people who are trying to change this right now. Phil Simon, author of the book, has been working on communication problems for the past few years and trying to improve them in a way that is less time-consuming.
In one of the chapters of the book, Simon compares two types of communication: personal, such as a conversation at a meeting, and text (mail). Proving the ineffectiveness of text communications, he cites the example of two psychologists from New York University.
Psychologists Justin Krueger and Nicholas Epley wanted to understand how well people can interpret text messages versus ordinary speech. Dividing the respondents into two groups, Kruger and Epley asked the first group to communicate and the second to correspond by mail.
The results were interesting.
Participants in the first group were able to correctly capture the mood and emotions of their interlocutor in four cases out of five. In the second group, it was possible only in two cases out of five.
The respondents of the second group complained that they could not understand whether their interlocutor used sarcasm or humor in the letter. It got to the point of ridiculousness: the senders of the letter could not say with certainty whether the recipient understood their idea.
In this regard, Simon proposes a solution.
The rule of three letters
Phil has been using this rule for several years and believes that it has relieved him of his mail congestion. Add a line to your mail signature:
I stick to the three letter rule. Let's meet or call after three letters.
Stick to this rule, as it will only work if you follow it consistently. If the correspondence is delayed, meet or call your interlocutor. This way you will understand it much faster.
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