What We Learn About Documents From Sending Too Much E-mail

Virtually all of us have been guilty of sending too much e-mail at point or another (some on the verge of spamming), especially when one is exposed to it for the first time. I suppose that it's only natural since e-mail is so easy to send. When you start collecting e-mail addresses from friends and family, you have to find out if it really works; so you send stuff.  And when you actually get a reply, you get that rush of excitement; and then you get addicted. Soon, you forward almost everything in your inbox that you feel is of any significance (yes, you remember now ... don't you?)

The cure? Getting bombarded with a ton of e-mail, of course; which then makes you question whether or not the messages you send are really necessary. A post from Melissa Macbeth gives us a great checklist of questions we should all ask ourselves before send out anything. The moral of her post is this:

"If you empathize with your recipients, your e-mail etiquette will improve and you just might send less e-mail. (The tone one takes in an e-mail also makes a world of difference - but that is a whole other topic.) And when you are the recipient of unnecessary e-mail, delete it! Don’t let someone else’s bad habits cause you to have too much in your inbox."

I also believe that the principles learned here will also help us in our decisions on the necessity of creating a document. The point of any document is to provide information efficiently. Unless you're writing a novel or something else that entertains, unnecessary content of any kind masks the important points that your document needs to relay, and thus will pollute it - even a simple flyer or brochure.

Does that mean we should also refrain from creating a document under the same circumstances? I think so. Many of us have received documents via e-mail that get opened one time and then sits on our hard drive for years until we delete it (or until our computer crashes!) But now I get some that I don't even bother opening, because I never needed it in the first place.

My advice in regards to these documents are the same as Melissa's: empathize with your recipients. Do they really need the document you're sending them, or should it be discarded on arrival?