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Email Tips
Streamline Your Email
Busin
ess today is becoming more and more reliant on email. While it is an excellent form of communication it can also be a huge drain on productivity. Many of my clients report spending 4 hours or more on email each day! Here are a few simple ways you can streamline your email and save yourself some time.
http://five.sentenc.es/ suggests that you should keep your email to five sentences or less. At five sentences, a person is more likely to read your email fully. People tend to skim longer emails, or stop reading them all together. Think about what you are trying to convey and boil it down to five sentences or less.
Organize your thoughts
In the fast pace world email is often casual and haphazard. It is very important to organize your thoughts before you communicate with someone to avoid misunderstanding.
Make key points stand out
Highlight, bold or underline important ideas and dates. If someone is skimming your email you want their eye drawn to the important information. If there are multiple points then use bullet points.
Send clear requests
Be clear about what you are requesting from the person. Often times I receive emails full of information with no clear request. What is it that you want me to do? Read and respond, make corrections, approve? If the recipient is unclear what you want, they will often do nothing. Clearly define what you need from the person. Make the request is easy to see by putting it in the first line of the email or bolding it.
CC and Reply All
Choose who to copy on an email carefully and encourage others to do the same. Avoid Reply All like the plague. Reply all is an overused feature of our email software. Just think about the last time you were a part of a long conversation between two other people that kept hitting reply all. It’s annoying and it clutters up your inbox. There are very few times when using Reply All is necessary, otherwise, reply only to the appropriate person or people.
Create templates
Is there an email that you send out regularly? Why not make an email template? In programs such as Outlook, you can create a custom template in the time it takes you to “save as”. Templates are great for mobile devices as well. Save a few commonly sent phrases or paragraphs and save yourself some time.
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