100,000,000,000 today.
100,000,000,000 tomorrow.
100,000,000,000 the next day.
…and the day after that.
It doesn’t take a math genius to figure out that that’s a lot. The number, 100 billion, represents the number of emails sent and received in the world every day.
Sure a lot are spam, many automated responses, and even more are archived or trashed without even being opened. You can slash that number down arguably as much as you want.
But take a more subjective approach: how many emails a day do you read? Too many.
What’s in an email? It can range anywhere from simple plain text to links, pictures, .gifs and video.
Consider another trending topic of interest to many: happiness (see World Happiness Report – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report).
There is strong evidence to demonstrate that practicing gratitude greatly improves happiness. I will let you peruse the working of Berkeley’s finest if you need evidence of this seemingly no-brainer claim (http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_gratitude_is_good)
So to improve the happiness of the world, a state of mind which elevates the brain’s vibrational frequency, let’s implement a way to practice gratitude when we send and read emails.
100 Billion Emails is an awful lot of reminders to do this.
Aside from the more extreme approaches like sending “blessings” in each email or the like, take a small moment to #pause and write that email with the intention of gratitude. Consider if it helps, the idea that you don’t have to write the letter by hand, stamp it, and send it in the mail if you’re short on appreciation.
But beyond this, demonstrate your gratitude another way: take an extra moment to make it visually look good. The conscious is constantly overworked and running on subconscious autopilot. With multiple distractions, and the ability to hold only 7 + or – 2 items in our head at once, we quickly fill up with the inability to extract information consciously at first.
This means we take short-cuts, cues from our environment to decide the value or lack thereof of something. Our subconscious looks at the aesthetics of things. This applies to emails as well. Well formatted emails, ones whose composers took the time to be Brief, Bold, and Bullet points make a huge difference in the feeling of reading an email. When an email has been composed with an added meme or .gif that elicits the emotion desired, the reader is filled with gratitude. A hasty email, nothing more than ambivalence.
Writing emails with great design in mind enables the author a moment to express his gratitude to the reader by taking the additional time to format correctly. The reader, by consuming a beautiful piece of content.
100 billion instances to increase gratitude and happiness is a huge number. Imagine what its significance will be on the world when we design and compose beautiful emails. Imagine the impact a service would have that does to emails what Instagram does to photos.
We may become bombarded with hundreds of emails of similar memes like food/sunsets/cats do on Instagram, but at least they will be beautifully designed.
So please, take the time to format your email, make it visually appealing, and make an effort to be concise.