Being rude saves me several hours a week

At least once a day, I get some kind of email newsletter sent through to me. I have not spoken with the sender in years, and I don’t actually read the content. The email will last less than ten seconds in my inbox before being consigned to the watery depths of my recycle bin. Incidentally, how politically correct is that? It’s not a recycling bin – it’s the trash. It’s not like my deleted files are going to be remade into something more useful is it?

Here’s the thing. Each one of these emails has an unsubscribe option down the bottom, but I don’t want to click on it. It’s not because I believe that, at some point, they might send me something useful – I mean, how would I know, because I’ve already told you that I don’t read it.

The reason I don’t unsubscribe is to spare the sender’s feelings. I don’t want someone to know that I am no longer interested in what he or she has to tell me, but I don’t want to upset them either.

Am I doing them a disservice? Absolutely. Any smart business keeps metrics on everything, and if they’re doing a mailing campaign, they want to keep track on just how many emails they’re sending out.

How proud the firm that can boast that they’ve just completed an email campaign to 50,000 recipients! Yeah, well – that’s lovely, but just how many people actually read the email and took advantage of the information or offer being shared? “We’re delighted to have had 15 new enquiries,” they say.

OK, so 15 is actually pretty good – but it’s only 0.03% - which is not so impressive.

The trouble is that we are a society of polite liars. We reject sales calls by telling people we’re in meetings. We tell people we’ll get back to them when we know we’re not really interested. We tell people we’ll ‘think about it’ when we’ve already made up our minds that the answer is no.

Why must we equate honesty with rudeness? Surely it’s so much ruder to let someone believe that they may be about to do some business with us when we know that they won’t.

Now there are plenty of people who think I’m rude. I tell people I’m not interested, or that I’m not going to take part in a certain activity. It’s not that I’m busy or have something more important – I’m just not interested. Certainly I often get challenged as to why, and that is a good conversation, rather than an attempt to close a sale.

I’m not suggesting that you shut every opportunity down before it starts to blossom, but you know as well as I do that there are whole bunch of things that come into you on a daily basis which simply stir no emotional response. They are blank space, and they’re stealing your life from under you.

Just think about how much of your busy time you could claw back if you just told people “no” instead of “I’ll let you know”. Sales people will stop calling, irrelevant emails will stop arriving and unnecessary meetings will cease to be.

Doesn’t that sound like heaven?