TED's Chris Anderson Is The Moses Of Email Overflow

The man who pioneered "ideas worth sharing," TED's Chris Anderson , is on a crusade to quash the frivolous emails that are taking up more and more of our limited time. "A lot of people have experienced a relentless increase in what's in the inbox," says Anderson. To fight back, he hopes to inspire a new digital etiquette, his " Email Charter " of rules to thin overflowing inboxes. Rules range from writing "no need to reply," at the end of an email to limiting open-ended statements, like: "How can I help?"

The core philosophy driving the charter is to "put in a set of rules that ensures it's faster to process an email, on average, than it is to create it." Anderson argues that verbose emails are often the product of insufficient thought--following the old adage attributed to Mark Twain when he once apologized to a recipient, writing, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." More thoughtful emails will be shorter and more organized, and, hence, easier to respond to.

Anderson is not the first to try spreading an email norm. Noted tech icon, Kevin Rose, once advocated a three-sentence maximum, with the help of three.sentences.es, which appendeds a simple Q&A signature at the end of each email to explain why the message appears curt.

Q: Why is this email three sentences or less?

A: http://three.sentenc.es

But Anderson's role as a leader in "spreading ideas" has attracted some influential attention, including this recent tweet by Twitter powerhouse, Ashton Kutcher :

Placing emailcharter.org in the signature is an important part of the mission, he argues, because it'll explain "why you're being a jerk."

Indeed, the charter's biggest challenge might be getting past the perception that curt or delayed emails are "rude." Professor Judy Olson, an expert on distance-based communication and trust, at the University of California, Irvine, finds that people often misattribute delays in text-based communication as the sender not caring about them.

"If you don't know the remote person well, when he/she doesn't respond in a timely way, you attribute that behavior negatively--they must not like me, or they're not giving me priority I deserve," she writes to Fast Company (yes, in an email). "Yet, its just as likely that you misspelled their email, they're on vacation, [or] something came up."

In face-to-face communication, it's obvious what circumstances may led someone to delay a response (they're thinking, they had an emergency phone call, etc.). Over email, SMS, or chat, those situational and facial cues aren't present, and we are left to ruminate over all the reasons why someone might not care about us.