Posts Tagged ‘email’

Minding your Email Manners

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

email

People who send and receive email on a daily basis usually have developed some assumptions about what defines good email etiquette. It’s a bit like the etiquette that governs social interaction – most of it’s common sense, or you can figure it out if you just observe people who seem to know what they’re dong. Unfortunately, those who use email less frequently often don’t understand the unspoken rules that everyone else is observing. An awareness of some of the basic rules for good email manners will help you avoid looking like an email amateur.

  •  The subject line isn’t optional. Even the most experienced emailer sometimes leaves off the subject line by mistake, but don’t make a habit out of it. People like to know what’s on your mind before opening your email.
  • The salutation also shouldn’t be optional. Many email messages jump right in with a question or request. Is it so hard to start the email with a simple Hello?
  • If an email asks a series of questions, answer them inline (see this article on Posting for an explanation on how to reply inline). This will help you avoid another problem, which is only answering one question when an email asks a few questions. There are people I know who need a separate email sent for each question, because they only seem able to answer one question at a time.
  • Don’t feel you have to be the person who sends the last email in a series. When the conversation is done, say thanks if necessary and then just stop. Don’t be like the guy in my office who has to answer every email. I once kept answering him to see how long the exchange would go on, and finally had to quit because he was never going to stop answering.
  • One of the most basic rules still gets broken quite a bit. Overusing capital letters and multiple punctuation marks LIKE THIS!!!!!!! is the equivalent of shouting in the world of email. Lose the caps and minimize the punctuation. The people who receive your email will be lots happier.
  • Reconsider using a quote as part of your signature for professional email. I’ve seen lyrics from songs and quotes from famous people included with a signature, and I always end up thinking the sender is silly, pretentious or both.
  • Go easy with the happy faces in professional email correspondence. Especially annoying are the people who make a demand and follow it with a happy face.
  • Don’t use your spouse’s email. With so many ways to get a free email account, it’s time to be a grownup and handle your own email.

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    Turn on Your High Beams and Focus

    Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
    By: Katie Tegtmeyer

    By: Katie Tegtmeyer

    A few years ago I had a boss who was the manager of a talented group of people who couldn’t stay on schedule. He had a hard time discussing planning with his manager, because his team was always falling behind schedule. Worse yet, he couldn’t pinpoint why they fell behind. Each project started out rosy, but within a few weeks the storm clouds were gathering as the team started missing deadlines. When asked why they were behind, team members seemed to come up with a thousand different reasons, all of which seemed important at the time. Most of them were spending several hours a day answering questions and solving problems for people on other teams.

    This manager had confidence in his team, but perceived there was a problem with focus. So he took a somewhat unprecedented step for a manager in an information technology organization – he asked them to take half of each day and stop reading email, stop answering the phone, and stop being so helpful. Just work. Heads down, hack mode, get the job done. There was culture shock at first, and then came the light at the end of the tunnel. Or maybe it was just all those mental headlights focused on a single goal, which slowly but surely was coming within reach. They began making their deadlines and keeping their manager’s manager happy. And all those people they had been helping? Well they either got by on their own or found someone else to do their job for them.

    Applying more focus is not just a work skill; it can also be a life skill. In a new book called Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, author Winifred Gallagher cites research from the University of Oregon which shows that people who have the ability to focus find it easier to stay positive and avoid depression.

    Many of the technological innovations at our fingertips these days have a tendency to disperse our focus. Browsing online, checking email, watching YouTube, Facebooking – all of these diversions can keep us from focusing on doing the things that will really make us happy. If you find yourself falling behind and missing deadlines, try starting your day by focusing all of your attention on your most important tasks for 90 minutes. Ignore all other distractions and resist the temptation to check your email. This exercise in attention will help you stay on track and could also be an aid in learning how to focus on what really matters.

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    Phone Call for …

    Friday, June 12th, 2009

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    If you work in an office and your job doesn’t revolve around phone sales or support, then you’re probably spending a lot more time reading and writing email than talking on the phone. There was a time when most offices were noisy places, with phones constantly ringing and the sound of phone conversations creating a feeling of hustle and bustle. Those ringing phones seem to have gone the way of typewriter and dictaphone in many offices.

    Back in the 1980s, I was a student intern with a programming job at an entertainment company where the computers were all in a centralized room. Each programmer had an office elsewhere, but still spent several hours a day in the computer room. There was a bank of lights and nameplates on the wall, and when the phone rang the light next to a name would blink to indicate who the call was for. On a slow day, one of the guys connected a speech synthesizer to the phone system and after that we had a computer generated voice which let us know who the call was for. With calls coming in all day from other parts of the company, the voice was going off all the time.

    I bring up this story because the memory of that voice comes back to me often as I sit in my quiet cubicle. I’m with a different company now and work is actually much busier than in my student intern days, but the phone is ringing less and less. The irony is that people in general are talking on the phone more than ever – using cell phones, that is. Wherever you go you’re bound to encounter someone with a mobile phone affixed to an ear. Not so in many offices, where email has become the preferred method of communication. There are definite advantages to email, including the opportunity it affords to answer a question after doing research and composing a well-thought out answer. There are also benefits in the paper trail which email creates.

    All the same, something is lost when phone calls are replaced with email. The personal touch can be diminished, and there may be less opportunity to get to know co-workers and clients. Looking back to my student intern days, I see that the opportunity to learn by eavesdropping on co-workers’ business calls has been diminished. You can learn how others handle difficult situations when you hear them on the phone, as well as finding out details about their work projects. Eavesdropping constituted a kind of on-the-job training which has been lost with email.

    I guess that’s why sometimes during long quiet afternoons in the office I find myself missing that computerized voice chirping “Phone call for …”

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    Managing your Inbox and your Sanity – Part I

    Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

    If your work is heavily dependent on email, chances are you have an Inbox management problem.  Receiving 100 more email messages a day can quickly turn into information overload if you don’t have a system for managing your Inbox.  Some time management experts speak of the Empty Inbox as an attainable goal.  I question the true value of that goal.  My experience is that even if I take an hour or two to achieve an empty inbox, I can only maintain it for a couple of days.

    I have my own system which allows me to keep a good handle on my email (and I receive a couple of hundred emails a day).  Here are some inbox management tips that have helped me.

    Create Useful Email Folders

    Mass deletion of emails from your Inbox is one way to clean it out, but if you want to use email effectively you should never resort to that.  In my office, being able to find information from past emails is critically important.  Even with my personal email, I often need to verify something in an old email.  You definitely want to keep emails, and a folder system is the best way to do it.

    Every email system has the ability to create folders.  Think about how you want to organize information, then create a hierarchy of customized folders.  When I say hierarchy, I mean start with a top level folder which will contain all the email for a specific objective, project or milestone.  Within this folder, you can create subfolders for more specific areas.

    I also create some generic folders for informative email I may want to access again.  For example, a “Benefits” folder stores email related to my company benefits.

    Move Email to Folders and use the Follow Up Flag

    On my best days, I read email as I get it.  If I don’t need to act on an email but want to save it, I try to immediately move it to the appropriate folder.  As a courtesy to co-workers, if an email requires action but I can’t get to it right away, I usually send a reply letting the sender know I’ve read the email and will respond to the action as soon as possible.

    When I need to act on an email, I flag it as “Follow Up” (this capability is available in all the Microsoft email applications).  You can sort your Inbox contents based on the presence of this Follow Up flag and you can also make use of a Follow Up flag search folder to view your Follow Up messages.

    Finally, email that is junk, spam or that just doesn’t need to be saved after reading is immediately deleted.

    Use Inbox Filters

    You can set up filters to automatically move email to folders before you read it.  This is done by defining rules for incoming messages.  It’s a very handy way to clear out your Inbox, though you’ve really just turned your storage folders into Inbox folders. However, this can help you decide what to read first and what to ignore.

    The system I’ve outlined above will move you a lot closer to the goal of a well-managed Inbox, especially if you move emails to folders on a regular basis.  Doing small things on a regular basis each day – read, store, flag, delete – will get you at least 80% towards a completely organized Inbox.  In an 80/20 world, that’s just about good enough.

    There are a couple of additional steps that take into account the fact that you might not be able to use folders effectively every day.  Those steps are described in Part II of this article.

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