thanks, you're welcome, no problem, cool

Ever been busted for “tone” in your email? Somebody thinks you are being harsh, curt, rude, snobby, short, etc?  You react with WTF and downhill we go.

I get about 200 non-spam emails a day. Tons of those I scan and delete, drop in read later, or forward to my assistant. I dread the 6 extra, thank you, you’re welcome, back and forth emails for the sake of politeness. Overall, I have a pretty good science about email with interesting ways to keep it under control.

One of those is to try and use as few as key strokes as possible to speed things up and prevent people from seeing that I am not a very good speller. 

There is fallout from that, of course, much of it around tone.

“thx” vs. Thank you very much.

“ok” vs. That sounds good to me.

“done” vs. I’ll be happy to meet up with you at the time you suggested.

I bring this up because I’ve seen a couple of start up CEOs use the following (more or less) signature file on their blackberry devices.

“Sent from my Blackberry, please excuse shortness, unintended rudeness, and poor spelling.”

I pass it along as a suggestion to those of you who get the occasional, “Are you made at me?” or “The tone in your email…..”  

I’ve heard about something called the phone which can help with tone. More on that when I find a number that doesn’t flip into voice mail.

Comments

[Colin]

There is definitely something to that. Joel Spolsky noticed something similar and implemented a snippets feature in Fogbugz because of it. Until he explained what it was for I thought it was a feature for the sake of having a feature.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FogBugzII.html

[Jeremy Wright]

Hmm. It's a funny line, because some people get offended when you don't do the "thanks, you're welcome, no problem, all the best" series of exchanges.

The more email I get that I have to answer, though, the more it gets under my skin. And I imagine that if I had a Blackberry (or Redberry) I'd get even more annoyed.

[Josh Einstein]

Maybe you'd like ActiveWords or even Word's autocorrect. That way when you type "thx" it can replace it with "Thank you very much." :)

I actually always make it a point to be complete and courteous in every email, even if from my Pocket PC. I would feel really guilty replying with a one word answer, but that's just me.