5 ms·
I was once in a seminar led by one of the world's pre-eminent primate researchers who explained that, without any irony or humor, he refused to scroll when read
by glup 6y ago
I was once in a seminar led by one of the world's pre-eminent primate researchers who explained that, without any irony or humor, he refused to scroll when reading emails--Anything important should be immediately visible.
- GGfpc 6y agoSounds like my professors, except they refuse to open the email at all.
- marban 6y agoFor a transactional mail or newsletter, perhaps. But overall I find this often-cited attitude made up by a bunch of productivity hackers highly arrogant.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- craftinator 6y agoSeems like a trait of those who either don't know how to delegate properly or who have attention deficit issues.
- archview 6y agoI have been developing my email habits to fit this. If my email is turning into a novel I make a point to bring the important information to the top as a TL;DR. If I forward an email chain longer then two emails I condense the email chain in my forwarded email so the reader sees and understands exactly what I need them to see. I have found that if I forward a long email chain/write a novel of an email no one reads the message. The email was a waste of everyone's time. Many of my colleagues simply FW: a chain with a simple FYI in their message. My inbox receives >100 emails a day. I am not going to spend my time reading through a +15 email chain forwarded to me attempting to decipher what ten people are conversing on in that chain.
- andai 6y agoI started writing a tldr or brief summary above my posts / emails, and then I realized if I summarize properly I can just delete the original text.
- yboris 6y agoI keep remembering computational kindness idea from the marvelous book Algorithms to Live By: Try not to pass the cognitive load to others. Make them do as little work as possible -- be computationally kind.
- AareyBaba 6y agoI like that term 'computational kindness' and will use it within my team. I've noticed that for some engineers this is a natural thing to do - they summarize threads, highlight salient points and document information so other don't have to waste time. They rise within the organisation as tech leaders who communicate well. For others, this doesn't even occur to them as something worth doing.
- chippy 6y agoHe was unaware of recent important primate conflict studies that found that top posters were in different tribes than bottom posters in emails.
- dhosek 6y agoSadly, software has made it highly inconvenient to do bottom posting on e-mails. I gave up on that war years ago. Maybe around once a year—if that often—I may do an old-school interlinear reply to an e-mail.
- tlb 6y agoA rare person whose productivity is increased by installing more browser toolbars.
- KMnO4 6y agoThis is also standard journalism practice, and I use it all the time as a somewhat heuristic for news article credibility. Journalists are taught to put the most important details at the head of an article, and the least important at the end. This is tradition from print newspapers, where your article would be cut if the editor didn't have enough space. Sometimes only the first paragraph would make it into print, so you'd better make sure all the important details are in there. If I'm reading an article and it doesn't have all the important information before the fold, there's a high probability (in my experience) that other issues exist (eg shoddy sources or plain factual errors).
- chmod775 6y ago> Journalists are taught to put the most important details at the head of an article In online journalism practice many do the exact opposite. They make you read paragraph after paragraph of speculations and bullshit before elaborating/explaining their click bait headline. Anything to make you stay and scroll so their ads get more screen time.
- pell 6y agoSEO also has encouraged this.
- gumby 6y agoRelating to another HN submission today about site optimization: my brain interprets this as "a slow loading site" and I just abandon the page after the first paragraph or two (exception: some private blog pages). Then again I started reading print newspapers about 40 years ago and this was also the approach for reading the paper so I learned a long time ago to be parsimonious with my time.
- greggman3 6y agoI stopped reading several links from HN today when it was clear the author wasn't getting to the point. If they had told me the point at the top I might or might not have continued to read but at least they would have gotten their point to across. As it is they got nothing across.
- jordache 6y agoend user screen real estate is a function of viewable vertical resolution of the email client.
- cortesoft 6y agoImmediately visible on what size screen and font size?