On Email, Upside-Down Pyramids, and Burying the Lede

burying the lede

“I don’t need more time. I need more deadlines.”

—Duke Ellington

In the world of journalism, they have something known as “burying the lede.” It is one of the cardinal sins of traditional “inverted pyramid”-style journalism, where you put the most important information at the top of the story, and increasingly less important details farther down (so, like an upside-down pyramid, where the top is the biggest part and the bottom is the smallest, hence the cool name).

The “lede” is the lead paragraph, which should deliver the most important news in the story. “Burying the lede” is thus putting the most crucial information anywhere else in an article except right at the top. Here’s an example I just made up:

“WASHINGTON, D.C.—The world watched Tuesday morning local time as President Obama met with Russian President Vladamir Putin in an historic summit. The American chief of state was wearing a sharp, light gray suit and a blue tie with full Windsor knot. His Russian counterpart was, of course, shirtless.

“The two signed a bilateral agreement stating that President Putin had really been kind of a jerk recently, and the Russian president agreed to cool it a little bit.”

See? I would want to know about that second paragraph way before I would want to know what the two leaders were wearing (or, in the one case, not wearing). That’s burying the lede. (For another example of burying the lede, please see: “This blog post.”)

How Email Buries The Lede

I was reminded of this when I was thinking about the way that email works today. At the top of the email, the first thing we have is the “To:” field. This makes sense: if you don’t put somebody’s email address up there, then email is just a really weird way of keeping a diary.

Second, we have the “Subject:” line, where you are expected to summarize what the email is about. For the recipient, this is a huge improvement over regular old snail mail: while it is sometimes possible to guess what a letter is going to be about based solely on who is sending it (e.g. if you get a letter from the IRS, it’s probably not a birthday card), it would still be really handy to know what kind of message it is exactly (e.g. a refund? An audit? A court summons? Please just let it be a birthday card). So, email nails the subject line. So far so good.

But then we come to…nothing. That’s it. There’s a Cc line so you can see who else is receiving the email (and a Bcc line so you can’t see who else is receiving it), and then it just jumps down to the main body text.

Doesn’t it feel like we are missing something? We’ve got who is sending and receiving the email, what the email is about and why they are sending it, but if you want to know at a glance when you need to deal with the email or how the sender wants you to deal with it (reply, just read, or take a specific action), you have to go read the rest of the email and hope that the sender put that information in there, preferably in as straightforward a manner as possible.

Shouldn’t that stuff go at the top?

How Timyo is Lede-ing the Way

With Timyo, it does. By letting the sender clearly and easily say when she wants the recipient to respond to the email and how she wants him to respond to it, right there at the top of the email, the recipient knows at a glance what the sender’s expectations are and can act accordingly.

In the business world, this is a huge bonus. Rather than automatically respond as soon as possible just to err on the safe side, or read the email through and then mark it as unread so he remembers to come back to it when the time is right, the recipient knows exactly when and how the sender wants him to deal with her email.

This doesn’t just save time for the sender and the recipient alike; it saves them a lot of unnecessary stress as well. And less stress means a happier, more productive worklife, because God knows we all already have enough other stuff to stress out about.

Speaking of which, I need to go check my mailbox and make sure I haven’t received any new “birthday cards.”

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