Email culture

How cautiously do you use emails with your team, company, customers? Do you think on how to help them make their life easier? Email today is the means of collaboration, even if you organization is happy to work with a wiki, an internal portal and uses (unfortunately a number of) instant messengers. Some of us get hundreds of emails daily and saving half a minute per email is a benchmark that very busy people are after. I know few that were so overwhelmed by emails that stopped answering/forwarding them  - they simply didn't know how to manage the growing snow-ball.

Here are a few simple tips of mine (the list is not exhaustive at all) that I found useful:

• Always fill the subject field. Make it as meaningful as possible. An internally accepted naming convention for what to put to the subject may seriously improve quality of rules and filters. It can be a branch name, a customer, or a product label.
  
• Put a recipient in the TO only if you expect him/her answering the email. Otherwise use the CC. It helps the reader to pre-estimate the email's importance before reading it and use filters/rules to sort it out.
• If there is more than one recipient and you question something or expect particular action from one of the recipients address  this part of the email to the recipient directly to help him/her not to miss it  (@John: or @DB team:).
• Answer emails in the reverse chronological order. When you get a chance to answer in an already quite going conversation don't take the participant back to the first email you got. They already have advanced in the discussion and you'd better off get yourself to the picture and read the latest answers (especially because the first emails are typically trailed at the bottom of every answered email anyway).
• Use the low priority for jokes and emails not related directly to the duties. Again, the same intention - help your recipients to draw attention to really important things.
• Use the high priority only if it's totally urgent. Otherwise it confuses the recipients and what's worse - you'll be known as a wolf-crier, so when the case will be really urgent nobody will pay attention to the small red exclamation mark on an email from you.
• Use OOO (out-of-office) auto-response if you can't return direct emails in a 24 hour interval of working days. If you don't use it and leave to vacation not only you'll find your boss unhappy with all the emails reminding you to answer, where (s)he, all of a sudden, became CC-ed. Your (and your team's) reputation and image will be damaged (let alone the fact that the senders may get stuck in the unknown).

The flip side of the problem is how to read and manage incoming emails. Dave Lorenzo writes about his experience in getting rid of the Blackberry and checking emails barely a few times a day. We're watching closely his experiment and impatiently waiting for the long-term results. It's the same problem - emails eat too much time of ours. I think we should address it from both sides - the recipient side and the sender one.

Waiting on your tips and experience on how to cultivate the email culture.

Update: David went farther and started deliting emails CC-ing him. Advocate emails (and Blackberry) is my comments to this approach.

Technorati tags: email, GTD, productivity, culture

Comments

[Rosie]

These comments have been invaluable to me as is this whole site. I thank you for your comment.