Making a 10 min email/work doc used to take far longer than 10 mins. Now it takes far less. This breaks the built-in guard against wasting people’s time.

I wonder if a minor UI change might help a bit: make it normal to show “approx 15 min read” in the email/whatever interface.

Just some sort of “this is the baseline amount of work you’re asking of the recipient.”

▲

prmoustache 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you can't articulate your ideas correctly and immediately, this mean you have zero understanding about what you need to convey in a message and your prompt will only lead to an unusable and uninformative garbage of an email.

Instead of gaining time, you make everyone lose time.

▲

lstodd 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I actually loathe those "approx whatever time to read" notices for about the same reasons the OP lists.

You or your model do not have and can not a clue how fast or slow I read, or, and that is the point, how much time I intend to spend on whatever is up.

The mirror is that you cannot know who my recipent is, or what I'm trying to communicate. It is equivalent in this sense.

You only [propose to] clutter the already overcluttered interface with crap, slop and shit. So bugger off pretty please. If you do not, there goes your product: outta my window.

	▲	Waterluvian 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think it’s different when it’s shown to the author, not the reader. It’s basically a word count feature, which has been useful since forever. Except it doesn’t translate into a unit that really means much for this context. Yes yes yes, it won’t be one size fits all and all those uninteresting “but what if…” points. What we want is to cue the slop generator just what they’re producing for their coworker or whoever. I hate getting huge pages of careless slop that the unthinking author probably imagined would look impressive. Maybe only show it as a result of the user pressing the “generate slop” button. Otherwise it’s not needed for normal, human emails.