Stevea Robbins here. Welcome to the Get It Done guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

Back before email, it took time to communicate. Instant messaging wasn't so instant. It required people

on horseback to ride for a very long time. If you were communicating in a battle, you'd send a rider to your

lieutenant. Hey, sup. They'd write back. Bored. You'd write back. Want to try a sneak attack?

They'd write back. Nah. It took four horses and two riders for that exchange. Battles got lost

a lot back then, but Millie the horse breeder made a fortune.

She was the 1800s equivalent of Lockheed Martin.

Email isn't always efficient.

Coordinating things via email isn't much better.

Because there are no horses involved, we mentally treat it as a conversation.

You're trying to organize a meeting of the Tofu as

building materials study group. You send an email. Shall we meet? No pun intended. They write back,

sure, when. You write, how about Friday? They write, can't do Friday, next week sometime. You

write Tuesday. They write, no. You write Wednesday. They write, sure, what time.

You know you've done this, and you've been on both sides of the exchange. E-mailing is

different than a conversation. That exchange might make a reasonable conversation, but conversations

weren't meant to be efficient. If they were,

we would beam thoughts to each other. And if you've ever been to a high school dance, you know

that doesn't work. No matter how hard you beam your thoughts, the guy, girl, or transgendered

person of your dreams will not figure out that you're interested until you compare notes over coffee.

Decades later. Word at a time conversation,

like the aforementioned email exchange, also risks one of you getting distracted. If someone

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