Sixty-Three Emails, One Sentence Each: What Happened When I Stopped Waffling

Last week I did something that would make my old self clutch her chest: for five working days, I replied to every non-essential email in a single sentence. No 'hope you're well'. No 'sorry for the slow reply'. No warm-up paragraph about the weather, the weekend, or the fact that my boiler is making a noise again. Just one line, sent, done.

I called it the one-line reply week. My partner called it 'being weird about email again'. Both can be true. It's 2026, and I still spend a ridiculous amount of time composing messages that could be texts. Something had to give.

The rules I set myself

The brief was simple, which is exactly why it was hard. One sentence per email. Not one paragraph — one sentence. I allowed a greeting if the email was to someone I'd never met, and a sign-off if it was a client, because I'm not a monster. But the body of the message had to be one line and one line only. No preamble. No 'just checking in'. No 'no rush at all, but...' — that phrase alone usually costs me four minutes and a small piece of my soul.

I also banned the apology. 'Sorry for the slow reply' is the British inbox handshake, and I say it even when I've replied within the hour. For one week, it was gone.

I tracked everything in a note on my phone: 63 emails, 41 of them what I'd call non-essential (scheduling, confirmations, quick questions, group logistics, one thread about a missing tupperware). The other 22 were proper messages — a friend's news, a bereavement, a work thing that needed actual thought. Those got full replies. The experiment was only for the small stuff.

The messages that got better with less

Here's the surprise: most of them improved. A one-line reply to 'Can we move Thursday to Friday?' is not rude. It's efficient. 'Friday works — same time?' does everything the three-paragraph version did, minus the bit where I explain why Thursday was tricky and accidentally imply I'm annoyed.

Scheduling emails were the biggest winners. So were confirmations. So was the group thread about who was bringing what to a birthday dinner, which had been doing laps of my inbox for four days. One sentence — 'I'll bring the crumble, arriving at 7' — and the whole thing collapsed into silence, the good kind.

I also noticed something about length. When I wrote short, people wrote short back. The ping-pong ended faster. My inbox on Wednesday evening had 11 emails in it instead of the usual 30-odd, and none of them were marked unread out of fear. That alone was worth the experiment.

Where one sentence felt like a slap

Not everything survived the cut. Two messages felt genuinely wrong. One was from a friend who'd sent a long, slightly wobbly note about her mum's health. I read it, panicked about the one-sentence rule, and sent back something so clipped it might as well have been a read receipt. I broke my own rule and wrote a proper reply an hour later, apologising for the first one. She was lovely about it. I still felt like a bin.

The other was a work email where a colleague had clearly spent 20 minutes explaining a problem. My one-liner ('Sounds good — go ahead') landed like a door closing. He replied with '...ok?' and I could feel the question mark through the screen.

So: one line is brilliant for logistics. It's terrible for feelings. The rule needed a caveat, and the caveat was 'read the room, Holly'.

The unspoken job of polite waffle

What the week really revealed was how much invisible work the waffle does. 'Hope you're well' isn't just filler — it's a small signal that you see the person on the other end. 'Sorry for the slow reply' is a tiny apology that keeps the social ledger balanced. 'Just checking in' is annoying, yes, but it's also a gentle way of saying 'I haven't forgotten you'.

Strip all that out and the emails get faster, but they also get flatter. I saved maybe 20 minutes a day. I also got two replies that said 'are you okay?' which is not the vibe you want on a Tuesday.

What I'm keeping

I'm not going back to the four-paragraph warm-up. The one-line reply is staying for logistics, confirmations, and anything that can be answered with a date, a yes, or a no. But I've reinstated the apology for slow replies, because it costs me nothing and it seems to matter to people. I've also kept one small thing: if an email makes me feel something, it gets more than one sentence. That's not a rule, really. It's just being a person.

The inbox is 63 emails lighter. The rest of it, as ever, is a work in progress.