Email is the bread and butter of the modern worker and it’s also its plague.
I have mentioned it quite often here because it is very simple to send an email but the problem is on the receiving side.
Think twice before you click “send”
That should be the first rule: before you send, please think! Very often, when we send an email, we get rid of a problem and we send it to someone else. Sending an email is easy, the difficult part is for the one who handles it.
There is a constant need to remind every worker (us), that we should keep the receiver in mind when we send.
The big WASTE
That’s probably the most annoying part: every time an email is send to someone, the receiver has to:
– read it,
– take a decision about it,
– reply,
– sort it into a folder.
Every time an email is sent to a group of people, every member of the group has to take the decision on how to organise and sort this piece of information.
If 10 persons in the company receive the same message, even if it is only a FYI (For Your Information) message, these 10 persons will spend time on the task of labelling, tagging, putting into a folder. What a waste.
Always consider who you CC
This is happening every day: you got involved into a conversation in which you are not interested anymore.
The perfect example is when you introduce someone by email. When I do that I am always very happy to see that a conversation is starting but not by the rest of it.
An elegant way
I have learned this little trick from Liza Daly who elegantly said:
Thanks for the intro, Craig. Moving you to BCC.
Craig who made the introduction has been informed that we were starting a conversation and was also probably happy to be removed from our back and forth who were not interesting at all since we starting by trying to schedule a call.
I am trying to make a compilation of best practices about email management. And you, what are your best tricks?
