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

Listener Charlotte writes in, I volunteer for a charity that supports people who are expected to pass away soon.

The many emails I receive require a personal and inevitably long response. How can I reply quickly, yet sensitively? Death is terrible.

I can understand your desire to treat each person individually,

showing the maximum sensitivity possible.

You would never, for example, want to say,

your condition may be fatal, but look on the bright side,

now someone can dig up your corpse,

turn you into a zombie, and recruit you to the zombie army to take over the world. Comments like that would get you fired

in no time and are in very poor taste. Don't even think about it. Your job is to be comforting,

offer psychological advice, but not get too close, and certainly don't encourage them to use

you as an ongoing therapist.

You need mass customization. That's when you create customized letters in large quantities.

It's the ultimate goal of technology, making people feel like you're paying attention to them

personally while actually treating them like interchangeable car parts. In other episodes, I've discussed using templates and email to make email faster and

easier to write.

I've also discussed using text macros to abbreviate sentences and phrases.

In the case of emotional communication like this, what you'll want to do is to put the

two of these together.

In days gone by, no one would ever have mistaken

trivial templates and brief soundbites for human compassion and connection. Fortunately,

it's the 21st century. Facebook and Twitter have done the heavy lifting for us. Now that

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