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[Patrick Rhone]

This is a continuation of discussions started by the blog post "Practice what you tweet". Mainly, I want to find out if you have any ideas for incorporating restraints into daily life that have really helped. Not only in communication per se but anywhere where living within less has offered more?

[dmesserly]

The first thing that comes to my mind actually does pertain to communication.

I've always had a tendency to be verbose in my emails.  Of late though, after composing a particularly long email, I let it sit for a while.  Go do some other work, then return to the email and start paring it down pretty mercilessly.  Did I need that extra sentence?  No, not really.  Could I say "verbose" in the first sentence as opposed to "a little bit verbose"?  Absolutely. Could I have said that entire paragraph in one sentence?  Probably.  I always try to assume that everyone's email In Box is as full as mine, and assume that they appreciate succinct communication just as I do.  I hope I'm getting better.

I find your point about Twitter to be interesting though.  Although tweets are limited to 140 characters, I'm amazed at how much some people just fill up the twitterverse with tweet after tweet after tweet.  It is the #1 reason I stop following people.  There are people with lots of interesting things to say who I would love to follow, but I just can't manage reading their 25 tweets a day every day.  Scary thing is I think I'm guilty of this myself.

This is an interesting topic, and I may chime in after I've had the chance to mull it over a bit ...

[Nathan Hale]

I've been trying to practice more Twitter-like brevity in many of my email communications and forum posts as well. I think that keep things short will--in general--lighten everyone's information load. That being said, I don't want to sacrifice my words to point that my messages lose their tone or personality. Sometimes, even on info overload, I'd rather read a slightly longer message that someone took the time to craft ina kind, cheerful way, than encounter a one-sentence thought that comes across as either a)sloppy or b)curt to point of being rude.

[Jason Echols]

Good point about Twitter and emails.  I can see where Twitter can positively affect the way we draft emails.

[Stephen Smith]

My e-mail weakness is that I tend to be too terse. They are often similar to a tweet. I find myself going back and "softening" the message a bit, and being a little more friendly.