John Connolly

Sentenc.es

Over the last few years I’ve worked with some individuals and start-ups who were driven by the constraints of large corporate bureaucracy to set up on their own.  They started out free, nimble, rejoicing in the lack of admin, and excited by the opportunities for efficient working practices.  However, some time later, they found themselves being choked as they tried to lever the latest trend, methodology, or software tool into their business in a way that simply didn’t work for them.

 

I’m going to write a series of blog posts covering examples of where fantastic practices and tools just haven’t worked in reality.  The reasons are varied; sometimes because they were designed for a different sector; sometimes because people weren’t using them in the way originally intended; sometimes because the guy who cooked them up had no practical business experience, or at the other extreme, he’s a super-star-global-CEO whose day-to-day work is massively different from the average small business.

 

My aim with these companies has been to get across the point that everyone’s different and we all work in different ways.  Therefore, don’t be drawn by the crowd, but evaluate and adopt where most appropriate for you.  Cherry pick the best ideas and the ones that will best improve your business.

 

In the first of these posts, I’m going to discuss email and the sentenc.es approach.

* * * *

Part I. Email

 

Email’s great. I love it and I think it’s a tremendous productivity tool.  I field around fifty to ninety emails per day and simply couldn’t handle this volume of admin via meetings or phone calls.  I try and deal with the bulk of it in two set blocks during the day and respond to anything marked as urgent as soon as I can.  My aim is that email should be polite, efficient, and sent with consideration to the recipient.  Each email should only be as long as is absolutely necessary.

 

Sentenc.es is the approach suggested by a number of websites that specify,

“…all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be a pre-determined number sentences or less (sic). It’s that simple….“.

I absolutely agree with the aims of this practice, but fundamentally disagree with their prescriptive one-size-fits all approach.  In some cases, use of it can suggest an unhelpful air of self-importance or perhaps even a naivety, a disregard, or lack of understanding of how other businesses operate.

 

In this post, I’m going to cover the use of the sentenc.es approach to both internal and external email.

 

Internal Email

 

Never blindly adopt a sentenc.es policy.

If you work in the sort of organisation where time is swallowed answering lengthy emails, emails with multiple action points or emails that are just full of waffle, it’s highly likely that this is symptomatic of a broader micro/over-managed inefficient way of working.  The way you use email will be one manifestation of this; meetings and other internal communications may also operate in a similarly bloated manner.

 

What’s needed in this situation is a holistic rethink of your working practices – not just a simple sticking plaster over the symptoms.

 

I’d argue that if you feel you must take the sentenc.es approach, it should be the very last thing you do.  Literally.

 

In your situation, whilst it sounds odd, email may be the most efficient way of dealing with your inefficiencies.  Suddenly dropping your email responses down to three or five sentences (or whatever arbitrary number is chosen) is more likely to decrease productivity rather than increase it.  You’ll still be generating all the admin, but dealing with it through more inefficient meetings or lengthy phone calls.  Deal with the root cause or problem that is generating the emails.

 

Long emails aren’t bad, inefficient emails are. Try and keep email as efficient as possible – perhaps using bullet points.  Specifications, legal queries on contracts, lists of changes to designs and patient reports all need a written record.  Email can be the best way for dealing with this, and it’s inconceivable that these communications could be kept to under X number of sentences.

 

To get you under X sentences, don’t just move everything into a Word attachment that won’t render correctly for everyone or a PDF that can’t easily be edited on the move.  Don’t just post everything to Basecamp, as that can become just as awkward as team members communicate in a way similar to sending Facebook messages.   I love Basecamp, and used correctly, it’s very powerful.  It can however be abused.  A routine threaded email message that needs a ten second reply from my phone, suddenly becomes a message with no context that requires a trip to Basecamp via 1-Password to deal with.  Not good.

 

External Email

 

Never, ever, ever ask your clients to keep their email replies to a set number of sentences.

 

If a situation is so out-of-hand that managing a client’s email has become a serious time issue, then the failure is probably with you, not the client.  Maybe they don’t value your time – why is that?  Maybe you’ve mismanaged the project or their expectations?  Did you start the project with an enthusiasm and frequency of communication that would be impossible to maintain?  However, perhaps it really is genuinely not your fault and they’re just a complete pain…? Whatever you do, they seem to want more…?  In that case, politely deal with it and look at the business case for future work with them.

 

I believe one of the fundamental building blocks of businesses should be a healthy yet fanatical obsession with customer care.  The problem with prescribing a method of preferred communication with clients is that things become all about you, rather than them.  That’s not to say that you don’t demonstrate best practice in your communications, but you deal with your clients in a way that makes them feel most valued and reassured.  For some clients this will mean fielding long emails, for others this will be face-to-face meetings or short phone calls.  A company I outsource some development to recently replied to a concise list of bullet points feeding back on some of their designs with a link to five sentences.  This infuriated me!  I’d rather have sent an email that took me two minutes to write and thirty seconds to respond to, than schedule a ten minute phone call which then needs to be written-up.  Picture that scenario in another walk of life:

 

The garage where my car is serviced send out an email promotion about their work.  I’d like to request a time to book in my car and to outline a list of issues I’d like them to look at.  It’s important there’s a record of the work which we can refer back to.  I haven’t time to make phone calls to them to cover this, so I spend two to three minutes writing an email as it’s most convenient for me.  Imagine my astonishment when rather than being delighted that I’ve chosen to spend at least £500 with them, they reply, pointing me to their corporate communications policy and requesting that my email replies are kept to under five sentences.  What messages does that send out?

 

What about another one more general one… You’re having building work done at home.  It’s not something you understand and naturally you’re worried about it.  You need a fair amount of reassurance at the start of the build process.  Your builder says, “I’m sorry, but I can only spare two minutes to deal with this and no more – my time is really valuable”.  The smart builder knows that investing early in that relationship will make for a more efficient project, rather than a nervous customer who needs constant reassurance that becomes ever more time consuming.

 

In both of these (imaginary) examples, I’m paying a premium for their time.  Therefore, in whatever is the most efficient, convenient and reassuring way for me to communicate with them, whether  by email, letter, fax, phone call or smoke signals, I expect that them to go out of their way to accommodate me, to reassure me, and to provide me with a level of service that matches the price I pay.  My clients should feel exactly the same way.

 

X-Sentences in Practice.

 

It’s an extreme example, but I recently watched someone spend a minute writing an email, followed by another two or three minutes trying to get the email down from eight or nine sentences to five.  It would have made no difference to the recipient, but the fear of going above five sentences was causing more work, rather than less.  In the end, I caved in, “..just send the wretched email and be done with it!…”

 

Conclusion

 

Let your aim be to keep email polite, efficient, and sent with consideration to the recipient.  Don’t waste time or risk looking rude by trying to fit email responses into an arbitrary number of sentences.  Don’t let the very things designed to liberate you become a millstone around your neck, when keeping up with the latest trend or fad distracts you from running the best business you possibly can.

 

Thanks for taking the time to read this.  Please do feel free to comment or email.