Note: i found this draft in a folder of old documents I’m clearing out. I have no idea when I wrote it, but between 2018 and 2022 is my best guess. I saw it was not on the blog, so am finally posting it here.
Saying “thank you” is one of the great civilized acts we do in daily life. It makes our social interactions with clerks, vendors, waitstaff, co-workers, friends, family – nearly anyone we come into contact with during our day – a little more pleasant.
“Thank you” marks the end of a transaction. We have concluded our business and I want to express my gratitude for your part in it. “Amen” is not too dissimilar in action and meaning.
But when it comes to saying “thank you” in email … aye, there’s the rub. Is it courteous to send a one-liner “thank you” email or are we burdening the recipient with yet another task and decision we have forced them to make?
My friend Bob calls these one-liners “closing the niceness loop.” We’re so obsessed with appearing “nice” that we waste our time and our recipient’s time with a one-liner email that did not need to be sent.
And if there are multiple recipients of the email on the CC line: heaven help them. Their inboxes are now filling up with one-line “thank you” emails followed by the obligatory replies of “you’re welcome” or “sure.”
Delete, delete, delete.
Fast Company, in an article on bad email habits, also condemns the puny one-liner:
Replying to an email with “Thanks” or “OK” does not advance the conversation in any way. “You don’t have to answer every email,” says Duncan, who takes a moment to analyze our email conversation. When I asked Duncan if she was free at 3 p.m. to chat, she replies yes and sent me her phone number.
“A lot of people would have replied ‘Okay, great, talk to you then’” says Duncan – an unnecessary email that simply clogs up someone’s inbox and doesn’t contribute anything to the conversation. To avoid being the victim of one-liner emails, feel free to add “no reply necessary” at the top of an email if you don’t anticipate a response.
Nick Bilton, in the NY Times Bit Blog:
Don’t these people realize that they’re wasting your time?
Of course, some people might think me the rude one for not appreciating life’s little courtesies. But many social norms just don’t make sense to people drowning in digital communication.
Take the “thank you” message. Daniel Post Senning, a great-great-grandson of Emily Post and a co-author of the 18th edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette, asked: “At what point does appreciation and showing appreciation outweigh the cost?”
That said, he added, “it gives the impression that digital natives can’t be bothered to nurture relationships, and there’s balance to be found.”
I find the one-liner thank-you a hard habit to break on our cohousing community mailing lists. We’re all volunteers in the effort so saying thank-you seems like a (cringe) nice thing to do to show appreciation. But when I look at a 15-message-long thread that contains 10-12 “thank-yous,” I cringe there too.
I favor not sending the one-liner. Those replies don’t advance the conversation, and I think they annoy all the other recipients who are eavesdropping on the thread and don’t care anyway. (In other words: it annoys me when I’m on the CC line of those threads. At some point, I mute the thread.)
Also, it’s likely I’ll see the person in real time or email with them on another topic; if a thank-you is indicated, there are plenty of opportunities to fold it in with another message.
However, there is a type of one-liner email I always send. When I’ve been assigned a task via email, I will reply with a single word – “Done” – to signal that the task has been completed. Since we’re all keeping records of our work in our email, I want everyone else’s inbox to have a record of what I did and when.
Thank you for reading.
