Another Reason Email Sucks Our Time Away
Writing an email last week, I suddenly had a flash of one of the reasons why email – and, indeed all the other technologies that make us write more often than speak – can eat up so much of our time.
I found myself thinking, very hard, about the sentences I had constructed: the order, the choice of words, the paragraphs. I was considering it from many angles, crafting it into something that would have the desired effect. In many ways, this kind of thinking is necessary when communicating in writing. People who have considered this before will have noticed, as I have, that there is far greater opportunity to be misunderstood in writing than in speech. And so, to avoid that, we need to think carefully about what we right.
In Daniel Kahneman’s work, this is of course the famous ‘thinking slow’, System 2.
When we are speaking, things don’t work like that. Think about just how little you think when you speak and you’ll be astounded. This is, of course, the hero of Kahneman’s story of human life: System 1 (thinking fast). It is our intuitive self and without it a conversation would be impossible.
This is not just, of course, because we don’t have to worry nearly as much about being misunderstood when we're speaking, although we don’t. In speech (even on the phone), enormous amounts of information are passed between my unconscious self (System 1) and whoever I'm speaking to. ‘We’ (our slow-thinking conscious minds) don’t notice it, but it’s happening all the time. Predictions, learning, exchanges. Neurons firing, speech being exchanged, tones expressing, expressions shifting. All taken in in less than the blink of an eye. And so we don’t need to be careful with our words in the same way, because they are only a small part of the communication.
But it’s more than that. For me, at least, the written word is much more of a tool for my slow-thinking System 2. Even after hundreds of hours of practice at writing in the way this article was written – essentially a practice of getting present and writing without thinking, trusting System 1 and sometimes explicitly asking it (or something else bigger), what wants to be written today in this moment? Even after that, writing is still often a System 2 tool. Or, at least, editing is. That’s the part of the ‘writing’ that really caught me up last week.
I’ve got better at that: I used to sink hours into it every week. Then I thought long and hard about the 80/20 rule, and decided that for most emails I got much more than 80% of the benefit from the first draft with no proof reading, and that the editing and returns that deminished incredibly swiftly. And I mostly stopped that proof-reading. My friends and clients had to get used to more typos. I had to get used to sending things that weren’t perfect (a useful thing for me, a recovering perfectionist, to practise in itself).
And sometimes, it’s worth slowing down. That’s the point of Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, after all. Though System 1 is the hero of the story, there are times we need to be aware that it doesn’t always get things right. We need to slow down and use the tool that is available to us: edit this email carefully, because there is the potential for misunderstanding here. Edit that email carefully because I can feel my emotional state is not in balance, my hackles are up, and I may write something I’ll regret unless I think about it.
But, we need to be aware of these things. Of how writing an email gets System 2 involved unless we are very careful not to let it, and we may not need it involved - it may waste our time. Instead, our magical intuitive self may have written the perfect email already.
But it is a way worth thinking about.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
The first 12-Minute Method Book - How to Start When You're Stuck - is out now!