Here’s a great idea that promises to save you a lot of time and clear out your inbox. It’s called Five Sentences.
Here’s the idea behind Five Sentences: Treat every email response like you’re writing a response to a text message and have a limited number of characters. In this case, five sentences.
Set a firm personal policy that you will never use more than five sentences to respond to an email no matter who the recipient is or what the topic might be. If you head over to http://five.sentenc.es/, they include a bit of text to copy and paste into your email signature that explains why the message is so short. They even include alternate text for four, three, and two-line responses to emails.
Each email should contain only pertinent info such as who you are, what you want, why you’re asking that person and why they need to answer, and what you need to happen next. The reason is simple, shorter emails are much more likely to get responses.
Give it a try!