Most of us agree that internal email can ruin our lives. Here are 8 tips to make email more manageable.
- Don’t ‘reply all’ unless necessary. Only reply all if all recipients MUST see your response.
- Be very clear in your subject line. Better yet, write your message IN the subject line followed by EOM (end of message).
- Keep all your cc’s in one file. Look at them once or twice/day in a chunk.
- Shut off audio email alerts. That ding WILL drive you batty, and will keep you unproductive for much of the day.
- Don’t respond back with ‘thank you.’ Assume together that you are all thankful people, and stop wasting each other’s time with another email to open.
- Avoid the BCC function. 95% of the time, blind copying someone is sneaky, is used for evil, and shouldn’t be done.
- Never email anything that has emotional content. Email is for information passing, not communication. Communicating is talking to another human face-to-face.
- Don’t email anything that you wouldn’t be comfortable seeing in your company newsletter. Email is not private, don’t be fooled into thinking it is (google “Sony hack” for details).
