Financial advisors can learn something useful from Shortmail.com, a service that lets people refuse to receive emails more than 500 words in length.

The lesson? Keep your emails short because that’s what your recipients prefer.

Here’s an exercise you may find useful: copy-paste all of your outgoing emails for one day into a word processing file. Then, calculate the length of each message. If your emails run much longer than 500 words, you may wish to revisit my tips in “How can I keep my emails short?”

However, I don’t suggest that you subscribe to Shortmail yourself. Insisting your long-winded clients cut their emails won’t make a good impression, even if it would lighten your load

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