I spend far too long replying to emails. Perhaps some standardised replies might save time and trouble
The break over Christmas and New Year has given me the opportunity to reflect upon my work and consider how I might do things more efficiently. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised how much time I spend on individual replies to emails. Surely it must be possible to develop a system for responding?
The American journalist H. L. Mencken used to answer all argumentative correspondence with a letter that read: ‘Dear Sir or Madam, You may be right. Sincerely yours, H. L. Mencken.’
This is obviously excellent but I think I will need a number of standard replies to cover the most common emails I receive. Here are the ones I have produced so far:
• Thank you for your email. I would be happy to help you with your PhD on ‘Idiots who have given the Conservative Party electorally disastrous advice’. Please thank your supervisor for thinking of me. Since you need only four hours of my time, we must fit in a meeting. It might be difficult in the next twelve months, as it is election year, but I will make every effort to organise it. It would certainly be easier for me if I didn’t need to visit you in Sheffield.
• Thank you for the intriguing assertions that you made about Zionism. It is only someone as perceptive as you who realises what we are up to. I do hope it is nothing that I said that let you in on the secret.
• Thank you for your email and the accompanying parcel containing the first draft of your novel. I was happy to pay the postage. You certainly seem to have enjoyed writing it and I am confident it is an idea that will not have been thought up by anyone else. I am deeply flattered to be asked to provide a foreword. I regret that for complicated contractual reasons I will not be able to oblige, but thank you so much for asking.
• Thank you for your email. I am certain that gay people will be grateful that you are praying for them.
• Thank you for your email. I do apologise if you felt that my column was an insult to UKIP and its members. I was surprised to hear that, since my topic was the chance of Queens Park Rangers being relegated from the Premier League. Nevertheless I am sorry to have offended you, however inadvertently. When considering my predictions for the outcome of the next election I will certainly take into account your optimism about UKIP’s prospects.
• Thank you for following up our exchange on social media. I looked up your description of me in the dictionary of urban slang and so was not in need of your more detailed exposition, but I am grateful for the trouble that you took.
• Thank you for your email. Your theory is highly original and I am grateful to you for elaborating upon it in such detail. It had never previously occurred to me that such a simple solution was available to a problem that had hitherto seemed to me so complicated.
• Thank you for your email. I do not believe that we are related and I don’t think I have ever met your cousin Chaim Finkelman. My father was a professor of measurement and control engineering and lived in Hendon, so I don’t think that the fur shop in Bethnal Green that you visited as a child can have been his.
• Thank you for your email. I am sorry that you feel like that. Are you sure that you didn’t mean to write to Matthew Parris?
• Thank you for your email and your kind invitation to speak at your breakfast seminar. I would be happy to oblige, but unfortunately I will not be in Durham the day after tomorrow at 7.15 in the morning. In any case, although it does sound like a most stimulating event, I do not regard myself as a sufficient expert on the Venezuelan pension system to be able to provide a different perspective from that of the eleven people who have already agreed to be on the panel.
• Thank you for your email with its many attachments. The divorce from your wife sounds traumatic and I am sorry that your custody case did not conclude successfully. Your many years of legal struggle must have been very tough. I am not entirely sure how I can help, but it was certainly interesting to read your correspondence with the Pope and the Lord Chancellor.
• Thank you for your email about the European Union. I had not, until now, been aware that when we joined, it was known as the Common Market. I was impressed by your formidable list of things that would have been better if we had not joined. Your use of a mixture of capitals and lower case assisted my understanding no end. I am not able, I am afraid, to provide current contact details for Ted Heath. However, if I should bump into him, I will be sure to tell him that you think he is a liar.
• Thank you for your email with its most interesting suggestion for a regular series of articles in The Times. The first instalment was well written and I will certainly pass it on to the comment editor who will, I am sure, give it careful consideration. Do you think it might work better as a letter to the editor? If you do, you might consider reducing the piece in length as we rarely publish letters of 4,000 words.
Over the coming days I intend to compose further responses to people writing about how all MPs live in a bubble, how members of the House of Lords are spending taxpayers’ money on champagne, how the British public were never consulted about mass immigration, how footballers are paid too much, how Gordon Brown sold all our gold for the wrong price, how I am sorry that my tie did not go with my shirt when I appeared on Newsnight and how it would be very nice if I could provide some words for the back cover of a new book on tarot cards.