No more Best Regards

August 31, 2007 – 9:01 pm

Simplify your life and stop writing . You can even stop signing most of your E-mails altogether. There is no point. They can see who wrote them in the .

Thinking about the is one of the most useless things we do. Over years we unnecessarily waste hundreds of hours of our and other people’s lives over this. With hundreds of millions of non-spam E-mails written every day in the world, the losses for our employers are huge. We should do ourselves and our correspondents a favor and simplify the way we sign our E-mails. The era is coming to an end.

Think how often you are not too sure how to end your E-mail message. Or how to interpret a coming from a close friend or colleague. Or from somebody higher or somebody lower in your company. How you are not sure if it is meant to give the message a note of respect, indifference, friendliness, coldness, promise, warning, expectation, disappointment and so on.

Think about a recent E-mail you wrote. As you were almost finished you probably got a little bit nervous: should you include a  or skip it this time? If you were replying to a mail you looked first if and how it was signed. If it was not signed the decision was probably easy: you didn’t sign yours either. But it’s not always that easy. What if the sender is your boss or your boss’s boss? Or somebody else you need to be nice to, for whatever reason? Then you better write something at the end.

So what was the best thing to put in there? Should you repeat the sender’s ? No easy answer: it may work with close peers but how about hierarchical, gender or age differences.

Your options were many: best regards, kind regards, regards, best wishes, all the best, yours faithfully, see you, bye, speak later, c u, c u l8r, ciao, take care, watch your back, sincerely, yours truly, best. By the time you made the choice, whatever it was, you lost a few seconds of your life that you will never get back. And the recipient of your message would go through the same process as soon as he read and replied to your mail. Double loss for zero benefit.

We don’t need anymore. It was necessary until the nineties when most mail was on paper and we needed to know who sent it. We also had to know where a letter ended in case some loose pages got mixed. And it was nice to send our greetings to the distant recipients of our infrequent memos.

It was bearable in the nineties when we were dealing with a hundred times fewer E-mails than today, the paper letter etiquette still ruled and many of us were E-mail beginners.

But now it’s time to end the transition. It’s hurting us and our productivity.

Seriously, let’s bury . Life will be simpler without it.

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