Having got married this year I have recently spent a lot of time writing thank you letters. I had to check myself a few times when, in my head, I assumed that the recipient had already read my "so lovely to see you" and "thank you for your generous gift", once I had put my pen down. Why did I think that? Well usually once you have written a message these days you press send on the email, text message, post or status update and it's there for the recipients to see straightaway (or it should be if your computer or mobile phone is behaving itself). I think it is an example of just how instantaneous we have become as a society as well as I reminder to myself about how enjoyable the act of putting ink to paper is.
This culture of receiving instant messages in bite site chunks has other knock on effects. In this age of reading messages on blackberry or simply having so many emails to read that you don't ever read any of them properly, the sender has to make sure he or she gets to the point and in not too many words. I find this filtering into my work life. Where I have clients who are clearly not reading everything I put in emails to them, the prudent course of action is to cut them down in size and make sure you say in a snappy way exactly what you want them to focus on. I am certainly not saying everyone is like this and I am also not criticising (if I had hundreds of emails a day to sift through and not much time to do it, I would likely adopt the same approach).
No comments:
Post a Comment