We all write emails. Every day. Every hour. When you start your computer at work every morning very often your “new email count” goes double, sometimes trible figures. From that huge amount of email you have to select the most important mails, urgent tasks and followups. This process often consumes precious work tim and is caused by the many mistakes you can do while writing an email.
I have no solution for you right now how to deal with this problem in your own inbox (except a ‘move all email to the deleted items folder’) but I can show you some advices how to set a good example and at least improve your receipients productivity.
In July I read an article of Mike Davidson on email overload where he stated that one of his main concerns is the asynchronus communication in email:
[...] But with email, often times the sender will ask two or three open-ended one sentence questions which elicit multi-paragraph answers. In these cases, the sender spends one minute and the receiver is asked, implicitly, to spend maybe an hour.
He suggested the “5 sentences policy” where you force yourself to keep email responses to five sentences or less.
Very often you don’t only respond to emails but have to start new threats as well. Wired’s How To Wiki published a very nice guide on how to write a perfect email. The guide gives hints on brevity, context and layout and should definitely be read by anybody using email as a tool at work.
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