OpinionMay 21, 2026 — 3:25pmThere’s a special place in hell for lengthy email writers. You know the ones, the colleagues who love sending messages packed with multiple headings, extensive bullet points and sections dripping with information. They usually take 12 paragraphs to get to the point, and hidden somewhere in the18th is what they want from you.Until recently the reasons for long emails was either oversharing, or workers who felt the need to vomit everything up to try to cover all their bases. Now we can add colleagues who are trigger-happy with AI and cut-and-paste drafts that are set to verbose by default.Can you imagine how much productivity we’d gain if we all just got to the point?ShutterstockIf you’re the unlucky recipient of such long-winded prose, you likely ignore them completely, skim over the headlines or file them away with a deluded intention of reading it one day that never comes.What long composers don’t understand is that if they want people to read and act on what they write, then there’s a startlingly simple trick they’re ignoring.Many years ago, software company Boomerang analysed the contents of over 40 million emails to determine what emails that were opened and responded to all had in common, compared to those that sat forever in inbox graveyards.The researchers discovered that the sweet spot for effective emails is between 50 and 125 words, with message in this Goldilocks zone getting a better response than longer or shorter ones. And to get a feel for how long 50 words is? It is the exact length of this paragraph.If you’re looking for elusive ways to make your workplace more efficient, start a serious conversation about email length.Emails that were shorter than 50 words had lower response rates, and message effectiveness declined gradually after 125 words, before falling precipitously off a cliff for emails that contained more than 2000 words (and for good reason too!).Writing a succinct email is an art form. You need to communicate your opinion and request in a short, understandable way. The same research found that using language writing at a year 3 reading level had a 36 per cent better response rate than emails written at a university reading level.Now, this doesn’t mean you need to automatically dumb everything down if you want to be heard, but you should consider the legibility of what you write as one of the aspects of clear communication. Simplicity is hard, and it’s harder to strip something down to its basic core than to overload it with complexity.Australia ranks 10th in the world when it comes to how many emails we send and receive, with over 8.1 billion streaming in and out of our inboxes every day. Can you imagine how much productivity we’d gain if we all just got to the point?If we cut the waffle words, stopped side-stepping around the real issues and cut our emails down to the sweet spot of one or two short paragraphs to make our point?If you’re looking for elusive ways to make your workplace more efficient, forget fancy software or expensive training and start a serious conversation about email length.It’s a small commitment that everyone can make to keep your communication to between 50 and 125 words. Because the simple truth is that one of the solutions to higher productivity is, quite literally, at your fingertips.Tim Duggan is author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com.Get workplace news, advice and perspectives to help make your job work for you. Sign up for our weekly Thank God it’s Monday newsletter.Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards, Cult Status and Killer Thinking. He co-founded Junkee Media and writes a monthly newsletter called OUTLET.From our partners