I discovered a link the other day (on Zen Habits) that changed my life — or at least it cleaned out my inbox.

The idea is to reply to all emails using no more than five sentences.

Mike Davidson wrote a great post, titled “A Low-Fi Solution To Email Overload: Sentenc.es”, where he explains it in detail:

“Every e-mail I send to anyone, regardless of subject or recipient, will be five sentences or less. Like a cinquain. Ideally, it would be a 160 character count like an SMS message, but since that would require an actual e-mail plug-in (viz. “work”), we’ll go with the much-easier-to-count concept of sentences instead.”

The 5 Sentence Rule seems to work for me because:

1- I am naturally long-winded. The constraint of only five sentences forces me to be more concise, which is probably as much a courtesy to the recipient as it is a time-saver for me.

2- I no longer “save emails for when I have more time to reply”. Since I know I will only be writing five sentences maximum, there’s no use delaying. This makes my response time faster, especially for important emails.

3- I’m noticing that my own emails get answered FASTER when they’re short, as people don’t have to wade through all the extra to get to the main (actionable) point.

4- As a writer, this will inspire me to put more energy into stuff that has a wider audience (articles, blog posts, essays, etc.) rather than emails.

5- It’s been my experience in the past that constraints often make me more creative and productive than total artistic freedom (when I can do ANYTHING, I often do nothing). It reminds me of constrained writing exercises, or Oulipo.

Of course, it’s hard to argue that this rule should or could apply to EVERY email. Of course not. But it’s a great rule of thumb that is, so far, making me far more “prolific” — and maybe more readable — in the email department.

Link (via Mike Davidson)