Ask HN: Is a system for single character responses to emails a bad idea?

2 points by pjbrow 10 years ago | 4 comments

Lately, I’ve been using a single character to respond to a lot of emails. I get through emails much faster (especially on my mobile), and the sender gets useful info back quickly. For example, if I get an email asking for something and I won't get to it until the day after tomorrow, I’ll respond like this:

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The text above represents a response below. I apologise if this seems rude - I'm taking this approach to make sure I get back to everyone quickly (http://patbrown.org/pointmail.html).

1 - I’ll get back to you within 1 day.

2 - I’ll get back to you within 2 days.

[Higher numbers mean the same as above…]

t - thanks, I’ll look into it but I’m not sure how long it'll take.

n - No / No thank you - I appreciate your message though.

y - Yes / Yes please, that would be great.

s - Sorry, I’ve read your email, but it’s highly unlikely that I’ll be able to fit this in.

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The drawback of this approach is that it comes across as douchey to a high percentage of people. Is the approach irredeemably weird / off-putting? Any ideas on how to dial down the douche factor while maintaining the benefits?

If it’s viable:

- Would two character responses for finer grained meaning work better? For instance, “c1” could mean “It’ll be complete in 1 day” and “w1” would mean “Will get back to you on the below within one day”; and

- What other codes / messages do you think would be important to include?

detaro 10 years ago |

> Any ideas on how to dial down the douche factor while maintaining the benefits?

Using something that replaces the letter with the matching text snippet?

pjbrow 10 years ago | |

I was considering this out the outset, but one of the benefits of sending responses this way is that other people I work with have started to use it (which they wouldn't if it appeared as a snippet).

davelnewton 10 years ago | | |

Do both.

I used to embed tags in emails, e.g., will-reply:2d and silly stuff like that for two reasons:

1) Keyboard macros could expand it into human-readable text (but leave the tag) and

2) The email client I used at the time made it easy to hang functionality off of email content so I could automate stuff like issue and time tracking etc. based on email tags.

brudgers 10 years ago |

Igonring the social dimensions.

From an information theory perspective, the lack of redundancy may be problematic, particularly if email is a noisy channel. Because hitting send writes to "permanent storage", typos "are forever"...and correcting them adds noise.

For example, I accidentally send "1w" when I meant "w1" versus "Will get bcak to you in one day."