Count words in an email draft.
Email length should follow purpose, and the useful benchmarks are short: around 50 words for a quick request, 90 for cold outreach, 120 for an internal update, and 350 for a genuine proposal. Reading time is the more persuasive framing — an email a recipient can read in twenty seconds gets read now, while one that visibly takes two minutes gets deferred and often forgotten. Average sentence length is the other lever: above roughly 25 words per sentence, an email requires re-reading, which is the real cost of long sentences in a medium people scan on a phone.
Inbox reading time
Inbox seconds = email body words / recipient reading speed x 60
Purpose targets
50 quick request, 90 cold outreach, 120 internal update, 350 proposal
Because it predicts behaviour. Recipients triage by apparent effort, and an email that looks like a twenty-second read gets handled immediately while a visibly long one gets deferred. Converting words to seconds makes the cost of an extra paragraph concrete.
Move the detail out and leave the decision in. State what you need and by when in the first two sentences, then link or attach the supporting material. A three-line email with an attachment gets acted on far more reliably than a 400-word one containing the same information.