At least in a business context, the vast majority of emails that I see sent out are mostly useless fluff. Many of them don’t need to be sent, and the ones that do are rarely concise or structured to summarize what they are saying up top, then later go into detail for people who might need more detail.
Time is a finite resource consumed by this, and there’s no penalty for using someone else’s. Businesses don’t, say, try to assess the business cost imposed by an employee’s sent emails when reviewing that employee’s performance.
I think that users attempt to compensate by committing less time to reading them. Doing ever-more-perfunctory skims in an attempt to limit how much of their time gets consumed by email that isn’t worthwhile.
And that tends to encourage not fully reading emails.
At least in a business context, the vast majority of emails that I see sent out are mostly useless fluff. Many of them don’t need to be sent, and the ones that do are rarely concise or structured to summarize what they are saying up top, then later go into detail for people who might need more detail.
Time is a finite resource consumed by this, and there’s no penalty for using someone else’s. Businesses don’t, say, try to assess the business cost imposed by an employee’s sent emails when reviewing that employee’s performance.
I think that users attempt to compensate by committing less time to reading them. Doing ever-more-perfunctory skims in an attempt to limit how much of their time gets consumed by email that isn’t worthwhile.
And that tends to encourage not fully reading emails.
I think you’ve hit the bull’s eye with that assessment. I try to keep my fluff, such as “Have a nice weekend!”, to the end of mine.