In this concise video tip, Randy Dean argues that the rise of mobile email consumption—where 30‑50% of professional emails are read on smartphones or tablets—necessitates a rethink of email length. Drawing on a Procter & Gamble mantra that research findings should fit on a one‑page synopsis, Dean proposes a simple rule: if an email requires scrolling, it likely belongs in a different format such as a meeting, a conference call, or a formal PDF attachment. He explains how attaching a detailed PDF and explicitly flagging tasks can signal importance, prompting recipients to read carefully and reduce errors of omission. Dean reiterates his long‑standing email philosophy—keep messages short, simple, and task‑focused, avoiding complexity, urgency, or emotion. He closes with Winston Churchill’s famous quote about the difficulty of writing concisely, underscoring the value of brevity.
Chapters
Hi everybody, thought today I'd put together a quick little video tip with my copilot here. Basically, I wanted to talk about this whole concept of email composition, and I wanted to give you something to think about. I think we've entered a phase where we need to rethink how we write our emails. And the thing that caused me to really come to this point was I read an article recently that said anywhere from 30 to 50% of emails, professional emails, are now being read on a smartphone or tablet device. And because of this, I think we need to fundamentally think about the length of the messages that we're sending. Because when people are reading items on a phone, especially, it's hard for them to digest really in-depth information. And so because of that, I— it reminds me of when I used to work at Procter Gamble as a market research supervisor. One of the mantras that they taught us when I was there was that if we brought in a study and we had to share the results with the other people in our department or group, it was sort of a normal thing to try to get it down to a one-page synopsis. If it has to go longer than a page, then they used to tell me, Randy, if you have to write more than a page on this research study you don't know it well enough yourself. And I sorta like that idea for email. I, I sorta have a new philosophy on this which is sorta similar, which is this: if you're composing an email and you have to hit the scroll button, it probably shouldn't be an email. Maybe you should use some other tool. Maybe it's time to call a meeting, maybe it's time to have a conference call, maybe it's time to put it into a more formal document that could be in PDF form. And here's the thing, I think when you make these things more formal documents, when they're more dense, when they're longer, when they have more information, when they're a little more complex, that will slow people down. By opening up a PDF, they'll see it as a more official communication, and they will therefore take that communication more seriously, take their time a little bit better, especially if when you send it out you make it an attachment on the email, and in the COVID note with the email, you say, "Everyone, this is a fairly involved communication. Please take your time and care to review it carefully. And also note, Joe, Bob, and Jill, you've got specific tasks inside of this PDF. Please pay extra special attention for that and let me know if you have problems with the due dates." See, by making an email like that, you make it so that people are going to take their time, review the information well, and get that information better, and then you can save for the emails that you're sending out, keep them much shorter in length. And I think that what that'll do is that'll help facilitate better communication. People will read them more quickly and better, and they will be much less likely to make mistakes or errors of omission. And that's really the key thing. You know, this reiterates and comes back to the whole concept that I've been sharing for years, which I think is email— the best email Simple information, task, or text that's not critically time urgent and is neither complex, difficult, or emotional. If you can follow those rules when you're composing your emails and keep them short and sweet, you're gonna be able to make these things work much better for you and the people around you and take away that possibility of mistakes or errors of omission. I'd like to finish this with that famous Winston Churchill quote: "I'm so sorry I wrote you a long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one." Thanks everybody. Hope you have a wonderful upcoming spring.
