My mind is troubled by the use of letter and email templates. On the one hand, they are a really excellent time-saving devices helping me, for example, to respond promptly to a larger proportion of my emails and creating time to invest in those that require more thought.
But on the other hand, they mean that my mind and soul are not actively involved in communicating with the person. Does our level of mental engagement in a task determine its outcome? Does this automaton approach lead to a loss of my identity? Is it possible that I will get into the habit of not giving my full attention in my human interactions? Are my conversations starting to conform to a template?
Am I in the process of transmogrifying myself into a robot?
Become a robot. It’ll let you have more time to be human. :P
I hate pre-formatted emails. But as long as they are properly modified to provide me customised information that I need, I am ok with them. If you not writing them from scratch means you have more time to devote to the custom parts, it’s all good and well. I’d even allow you to use a quarter of the time saved for more coffee breaks.
But sometimes I feel like they’re just one more hurdle to overcome to start a real comunication. Not yet as bad as automated answering machines, though.
I guess you may encounter identical inquiries everyday, the answers to these inquiries being the same. Templates are just the human result of dealing with identical inquiries.
Oh Bronwen, it is late, all I can say is “I sympathise”. What do you do when every day you have tens of people writing you identical letters, and you have to respond? Maybe the little personal sentence in a template is the soul in the template of the universe (or metaverse as another Network blogger might say).