Occasionally I’ll notice people using five.sentenc.es (from their email signature).

Example:

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Q: Why is this email five sentences or less?
A: http://five.sentenc.es

Their emails will literally be five sentences or less, every time they reply to you. You could even test it – try sending them a difficult question or theory (which should garner a longer reply), and the reply will come back as five sentences or less.

They purposely make it short.

I think this is great from an efficiency standpoint. You make it much easier on others (your recipients) by making your emails very quick and to-the-point.

If the whole world did this, we’d all spend much less time in our email inboxes.

The problem is this: since they are intentionally limiting their replies to five sentences or less, they literally can’t break that self-imposed rule, so for topics that require more explanation, the last sentence will almost always be:

“If you want we can hop on a quick phone call so I can explain this further.”

So instead of just explaining it all via email (with possibly only a few more sentences), they want to take up the other person’s time via telephone.

How is that being more efficient? What’s the point of limiting your reply if you have to make a follow-up phone call each time?

I think it’s silly nonsense. It’s one thing to be concise in your email correspondence, but another thing entirely to force yourself to do something that ends up requiring more work.

Brevity is king, I realize that, but every situation is different and you should be able to adjust accordingly. A good habit is not necessarily a sentence (as in being sentenced to do something). No pun intended.