Tom Heath's Displacement Activities

Summary: squeeze all the content of very short emails into the subject line, then prefix it with the abbreviation AISL: so people know that the content they need to read is all in the subject line.

Don't you just love it when email arrives with a meaningful subject line? Don't you love it even more when all the information the email contains is loaded into the subject line so you can ingest it in one go and delete the email, no further clicks required?

I know I do, except when I have to open the mail first to check if anything else is in there, something that's especially painful with some of the webmail interfaces out there. So, let's save everyone a little bit of email pain with this solution:

1. squeeze the content of very short email messages into the subject line
   
2. prefix the subject line with AISL: so people know they don't need to read the message
   
3. leave the body of the message blank to reinforce the idea that its AISL
   
4. don't even include a signature; this will save everyone a bit of mailbox space