Mistakes, both technical and ethical, will always be made in communication. The goal isn’t to eliminate mistakes, or even to reduce them to the lowest level possible. The goal, as with anything, is to optimize the ratio between risk and benefit.
By spending an hour proof-reading each email, you could reduce your mistakes to close to zero, but you would also immensely reduce your productivity. On the other side of the spectrum, by never proof-reading anything, you would be able to get a lot more done, just with a lot more mistakes.
We are constantly battling and readjusting to find a balance between accuracy and productivity in communication. I’m not sure anyone has a real answer, much less one that would work for everyone, but I’ve recently found a simple way to get closer to this balance: Just take a deep breath before you click anything that produces an action.
Activation clicks include, sending an email, posting a tweet, publishing a post, making a purchase, etc. It’s a tiny adjustment, but it seems to be pretty effective. It forces a disconnect in the flow between creation and execution in which you can objectively observe, even for just a moment. When we are in the creative mindset we view execution as the end of creation, not the beginning of activation. Hopefully, the deep breath rule for activation clicks can help reduce some mishaps.
