In the last couple of years, I’ve written quite a few emails with the following line:

I ‘ve written this quickly rather than perfectly. Apologies for any typos/grammatical errors/if anything comes across the wrong way. Please take in the positive spirit in which it’s intended.

Ultimately, it’s a compromise. My time has been squeezed, and in many cases, it has been my only option: I haven’t been able to write an email that meets my “normal” standard, at least not within any reasonable timeframe.

If and when I get to a point where I have time to write better emails, I suspect I’ll keep the practice going. There will be exceptions – where the stakes are really high, for instance.

But in most cases, my preference is to prioritise velocity over perfection.

Ultimately, it’s about diminishing returns. Let’s say it takes 2 minutes to write an email and get it to 80% of where I want it to be. it’ll take me another 2 minutes to get it to 90 or 95%, and another 2 minutes before it’s ~99% of the way there. (Never perfect!) In most cases, the substance of the email is likely to be the same. It just won’t have the same polish.

Would I prefer to get a single email to ~99%, or three emails to 80% within the same time span?

Life is short. Unless the stakes are high, I’ll go with the latter.

In a way, this reflects the tension between our ideals (ie, I’d love for my communication to always be well-crafted and error-free!) and the constraints of reality (“every second wounds, the last one kills”).

If you get an imperfect email, please don’t take it the wrong way!!!!!!!! If I send an email, it’s almost always going to be sent with a positive spirit – if it comes across the wrong way, then I’m likely to feel mortified by it, and please accept my apologies. I’ll try not to make typos or grammatical errors, but if it happens, it happens.

Put it another way: would you prefer to receive one email from me, or three? Maybe you appreciate the polish. But my guess is that for lots of people, quantity has a quality of its own.

Many people might think that including the line “I’ve written this quickly, rather than perfectly…” in an email is overkill. Perhaps that’s what we should expect with emails! (After all, emails are where keystrokes go to die.) Writing a longer article about it, even more so. Maybe it is. But it’s the sort of thing I feel like I need to explain, so whatevs. 🤷‍♂️