Email A to Z: Email Made Easy

I had been getting several emails a day of information on a project I was putting together for a client. I got the emails and was doing the work and thought that was enough. I mean email always gets through right? The chance that I did not get her emails was slim and none. I had forgotten a common courtesy. I should have responded to each and every one of her emails.

I didn’t need to write a novel, but a quick line or two was in order. How do I know? Well, I got a frantic call asking me if I got the emails she was sending? Was it what I needed? Was I ever going to let her know that I got them? I say it all the time but business and life is all about relationships. We need to cultivate and nurture these like crops. The point is if someone sends you requested information via email, send back a simple acknowledgment. It is the polite thing to do.

Page Moseley, certified Email Etiquette trainer — Get more information here

Leo is a friend of mine out of Toluca Lake, California. He is in the mortgage business and told me a story about forwarding an email to the wrong person. He had gotten a suspension from a bank on a loan he had submitted for a client. Instead of giving his client a call he forwarded the email, only he sent it to a different client. One he had not even taken a loan application for yet. The perspective client thinking that he could not get a loan through Leo went to another mortgage broker to get his loan. Which brings me to these two points that I teach in my training programs.

• Email Rule #4 Think before you forward
• Email Rule#1 Don’t send bad news over email

Leo forwarding folly with his client not only cost him a loan, but a good referral source too. Business is ALL about relationships and service. Email is for saying yes, no or maybe. If you have bad news that you have to share, pick up the phone. People can hear your intentions over the phone. Who wants to work with someone who doesn’t care enough to call in a difficult situation?
Page Moseley, certified Email Etiquette trainer — Get more information here

I just received an email from an old friend, with a link to If I Did It on Amazon.  He asked me, “Can you believe this guy? What will the publishers think of next?”  I wondered if my friend had been in a coma for the last week.  Had he not read the reader responses (eg. “we did it!”)??

When something happens at Yahoo; the stock drops, a disgruntled exec writes a manifesto — I get the announcement through email up to a dozen times from well wishers.

Every day our email inbox gets cluttered with two kinds of spam: commercial spam and friendly fire.  Friendly fire is when you are buried with well-meaning but highly redundant content.  Even in our family we have one netcaster who sends us dozens of emails a week – we call him Uncle Spam.

We focus on reducing spam, yet become spammers ourselves when we play towne crier and send out dozens of emails/videos/etc. every day to our mailing list (often in CC, where anyone could reply to all and start a vicious cross-post).  Most of the time, we accompany it with “thought you’d like to know” and they usually just delete it (after it finally downloads on their black berrys at the airport).

Let all try a different approach.  If it is on the homepage of Yahoo in the news box, everybody knows.  Deal?  If it isn’t a piece of strategic information (your competitor is in play), lets err on the side of silence.

In the future our best email pals, like a good blogger, will surprise us with useful insights that we haven’t already been exposed to.   Hopefully we’ll learn from them and start to give our email partners in life “good return on attention” and be part of the solution instead of the problem.   It’s good to be a maven, we just have to give people more credit.

Recommended read:  Simplicity by Bill Jensen

I read an article recently about a new work related illness — Black Berry Thumb.

I could see this one coming.  There are millions of people that are as obsessive compulsive as church rats when it comes to their emails.  Six or seven years ago before mobile email, you hit the F5 (function 5) button fifty times a day to check your email.  And for what?

People that carry Crackberry’s around and use them to immediately answer all comers write the worst replies, often cryptic and full of spelling and punctuation errors.  And according to this article, they end up with an injury to boot.

Don’t get me wrong, you need to know when an important message is out there (on email, voice mail, etc.).  I’m not saying to be out of touch.  What you need to do is find balance and write mobile email communications as a last resort.  You should only respond to emails that need an immediate answer when you are in transit.  The way I do this is simple;  I treat my Crack Berry as read only.  If I see an email that needs my immediate attention, I call that person on my cell.  First of all, it is way quicker, especially if the answer needs to have some sophistication (they all do).

In rare occasions (maybe 10% of the time), I can email back a word like “approved”.  But most of the time I read and respond by phone.

Try this approach out next week and give your thumbs (and other people brains) a rest.

PS– You should also respond to emails with a phone call when someone is upset (poor service, misunderstanding, etc.).  It will surprise them that 30 seconds after they hit the send button you called them to deal with it.  It will also help you communicate your intentions via your audible tone of voice.

What ever you do, don’t live like a rat in a cage on an endless thread.  How do you answer emails on the go?

If you want to have a productive relationship, especially with someone of power, obey their preferences when it comes to email.

I learned this lesson at a critical point of my life at Yahoo.  Anil Singh ran Yahoo’s sales and marketing groups for years and was the guru of numbers.  He is a brilliant and powerful man, and everybody wanted to work for him.  So he was pummeled with information, most of it useless.  I wrote him an opus about a meeting I attended with a huge prospective partner.   The next day, from his cube, he pointed to me and motioned me into his space.

“Look at all this reading material”, he opened.  He was sitting in a mountain of documents, charts and bound reports.

“You should be able to fit any email message into my preview pane.  Otherwise, come see me or call.”

I immediately realized that I could be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.  Anil is a “preview pane” guy that wants pithy, to the point requests and answers to his emailed questions.  For anything complicated, he liked warmer levels of contact (email cold, face to face real warm).  I honored that request from that day forward and it made a huge difference in my relationship with him.  When I went to work for Greg Coleman and later Wenda Millard, I learned their email preferences right away and stuck to them.  This is a little known secret about how to handle brand new relationships at work.  If you make this as important as knowing their birthday or their favorite football team — you will go far in your BizLife.  Most people will not tell you like Anil told me.  That was good luck, a gift.  To obey, you first need to ask about the rules.

Dr. Tony Alessandra coined the phrase, “The Platinum Rule”.  Whereas the Golden Rule says that you reflect your preferences on others (which would suck for them if you are self-destructive), the Platinum Rule says, “do unto others as they want to be done unto!”.

Yep, that’s right.   New email law:  obey preferences.

Editors Note: Thanks to Scott Zimmerman, Managing Partner at Platinum Rule Group for setting us straight on where the Platinum Rule came from.

More than ever, less is more when it comes to words in our email Inbox. Did you know that the average information worker (like you and me) reads the equivalent of a novel every two days?  And we read it at lightening speed, scanning it in from a computer screen.  Sometimes it is not the volume of emails that we drown in, but the density of some of the notes we get from our colleagues.

When someone writes an email to us that would be ten pages long printed out, we just close the email and say to ourselves, “I’ll read that when I have time.” 

The person sending it to you took a great deal of time to write it.  You don’t want to swim through it and it takes forever to finally deal with it.  This is not good for your relationship or the purpose of the email in the first place. 

Today, simple is the new smart – especially at work.  For some companies simplicity (in Customer and employee interactions) is a competitive advantage.  Part of simplicity is the reduction of information aimed at a target.  Fewer words = a better experience for them in communicating with you which = more future attention.  Email is far from simple when it comes to conveying complex ideas, emotions and intentions.  You would have to write dozens of paragraphs to convey the subtle nuisances of a phone or face-to-face conversation. 

Yet, many of us rely too much email to conduct conversations.  It’s like we are hiding behind our laptop letting our flying fingers do our talking.  When you find that the body of your email cannot fit into the preview pane (Outlook) or a computer screen, pick up the phone and talk to them about it.  Academic researchers to technical writers all agree that the shortest distance between two minds is a live conversation.  Nothing beats it.

NOTE:  This is usually, but not always the case.  I like to establish communication preferences with people when I first start to work with them.  How do you want me to contact you, phone or email?  Do you like short emails with more detailed stuff in phone calls or do you want it all in a note?  It is conversation worth having and will improve your business relationship.   

For more information on how simplicity is a new competitive advantage in business, read Bill Jensen’s brilliant book Simplicity. 

Blog reader (and good friend) Seth Dechtman pointed me to an interesting article (Lost In Email) from the New York Times that talks about how companies are trying to tackle information overload and constant interruptions at work.

These companies are smart to deal with this issue. My own research confirms that overload combined with the constant interruption of incoming emails makes work more stressful and leads to depression and lost productivity (The NEDS Study).

What can you come up with to help your company break free from the shackles of always on? Post your replies in comments.

Check out the New York Times article (Lost In Emal)

Sometimes you can turn a great working relationship into a broken one over email.

Think about how many emails you exchange with your partners at work. Take, for example, the last fifty emails you’ve sent your right hand person (if you have one). If you isolated them, and just read what you wrote, should you be proud?

I challenge you to audit the last fifty emails you’ve sent to a trusted business partner. Read them for tone, intension, friendliness, reasonableness and crypticness. Imagine you received them, all in a pile over just a week or so. How would you feel? Are you coming across as a coach or a dictator?

If you do this exercise, you’ll realize that email is really a poor way to say no or talk about emotionally charged things. The phone truly the next best thing to being there.

Here’s a simple piece of advice: Attend your next meeting device-free.

There was a provocative LA Times article about going lap-topless to meetings. While I like that idea, I think it doesn’t stretch nearly far enough. Don’t bring a cell phone, laptop, crack berry, anything! Bring a pen, paper and your attention. Why? Because you’ll have a more effective meeting and build relationships.

When I was conducting surveys in researching The Likeability Factor, I learned that the #2 reason your coworkers or customers might find you dishonest is your lack of presence during meetings. Your constant attention diversion to your cell, email pager or laptop sends a message to everyone that you are not with them, and don’t respect them enough to give your undivided attention.

This rule (no phones, laptops or email pagers in the meeting) is the bonus rule at the end of my new DVD product (The Dirty Dozen Rules Of Email Etiquette).

Here’s another installation in my rules of email etiquette: Don’t reply to say “thanks”.

One of my basic rules of email is to let the thread (the back and forths) stop. Don’t get in the last word, even if it is “thanks”.

DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR?
You are working on a spreadsheet (and consulting paper) and your Outlook envelope starts to flash and you stop what you are doing to check your email. A coworker replied, “thx” on their crack berry — you had emailed them a report yesterday. You peck hard on the delete button, sigh, and toggle back to the spreadsheet.

Multiply that interruption times five a day and you now understand the plight of the over-pinged information worker. One more interruption is still one more irritation. In my study on NEDS (New Economy Depression Syndrome), I quoted Heartmath Research Institute talking about how interruption was as bad as overload, when it came to creating information stress.

Let’s be kind and let the digital conversations die with the successful transaction. The next time someone sends you what you ask for or answers your question — tell her thanks in person the next time you see her. For now, give her a break so she can finish her spreadsheet and go home.

PS — This counts 1000% for reply-to-all thanks.  When someone hits reply-to-all and says that one word, a  batch of chatter erupts as others feel compelled to say thanks too.  Those will drive you crazy and sometimes create a vicious cross post, leading to a dozen other RE RE RE RE email interruptions in your life.