Sure, practice conciseness.
- For your familiar team, during any verbal communication, take time to restate your position and why brevity may be in your email. Remind that text doesn't always convey tone well, even more so when writing quickly first to establish that it's never personal (and make sure it's never personal)
- Practice figuring out exactly what you want someone to take away from your email and figure out how to effectively reduce your content. Don't bother with automated tools on this, they're all awful and just introduce more confusion -- you need to practice this and see what works with different types of communicators.
- Size up who you're writing to; if they're verbose, likely they think verbosely and you'll need to pick out the elements you need to expand on. For more concise speakers, use specific terminology (they will figure it out)
- Use white-space heavily to draw attention to important topics. Save highlighting/bolding for only the items that are absolutely essential they're understood (e.g., "Don't do this you'll break everything", "we must absolutely not do this because of X." and expand on X a bit more) A simple line break makes it easier to read
- Judge your audience and write an appropriate response -- e.g., Sales doesn't need to know why a bug is taking so long or why you aren't fixing it; you can take the time to explain, but ultimately either:
a) what you write will just be copy/pasted to a client who also won't understand it
b) your contact will muddy your idea anyways when trying to rephrase it
Focus instead on what needs to be understood and save the details for those who need it
- End longer emails with an enumerated list of action points; if they take anything away from your email, make it that, and people will typically respond in kind to keep emails fast and short
- Drop the corporate signature -- no one cares or likes the sigs with dozens of images about certs/awards no one has ever heard of and it clutters communication
- Don't be afraid to outright ask for a TLDR -- don't be rude, just say something like "I'm having trouble following this; can you provide a more concise summary that clarifies these points for me: (bullet list of things you need to know to take action)
- Identify in advance stuff you can automatically delegate to your trusted team and make a distribution list for this. Require people go through the list. You can speak much more concisely to those who know you because they understand what needs to be done, so once it lands, just fwd it to your team @'ing the relevant person with brief instructions
- Reports are for start of day/end of day; filter out the important ones and be very judicious here. Reports should serve you, not the other way around. If you're spending more than an hour with reports, likely you have too many or you need to revisit the purpose of the report
- Random emailers get deprioritized always. If you cannot figure out what it is you want in a few seconds of reading, ignore it or if you sense there is some actual importance, a quick email asking for the polite TLDR
- (Technical items only): unless it's a specific issue you're working on currently/frequently, practice filtering out and just mentally categorizing "we have issue with X" so that if you deal with X later, you know just to check this at that time. Such items are good to have a note on, but you don't need the specifics until it comes up.
- Don't let randoms use chat with you -- they must go through the filters and email no matter how important it seems to them
- Prioritize your team and make sure they understand they have your attention -- even a quick "I've seen this, I need time to respond though. Meetings till HH:MM" is enough (remember to stress to your team brevity is never ignoring)
- Corollary to the above, let your team know how to get your attention for important stuff, and then respect those methods. This is important to keep the flow of communication good
- Turn off the automated responses from Outlook/Gmail, most of the time they're useless and miss the context entirely, and will just end up with more email
- For stuff you do need to write out frequently (instructions on accessing something, process, etc), start documenting it carefully and send links with a quick polite note like "hey! We actually have this documented here in full. Give it a read and let me know if you have questions"
- Autohotkey can be used for other such items that need to be done repeatedly
- Take control of the Subject line once you own an email and make the email fit your filters. Very few people will care, and it only makes your life easier
- Practice typing. I used to play a lot of online games so got used to fast typing, but there are lots of typing games that are fun (Typing of the Dead is not only funny as heck, but it's pretty good, I unironically recommend it)
- Practice objectivity and removing accusatory statements and inflammatory ones. "You did this, here's why it's wrong" feels personal and you get defensive emails as a response. "Looks like X is the current state, we need to get to Y, here's the path I propose" does the same thing (teaches them the right way, corrects the state), but avoids the backlash
I could go on as I have a LOT of thoughts on this, but ultimately it comes down to figure out what you actually want to say, avoid personal attacks, delegate when possible, document items you frequently repeat, make the conversation fit your filters