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Dr Monica Seeley - 353 found.Are you an email junkie? Email addiction is a costly to you and your business (even you love life). We become distracted from the task in hand. It drives up stress levels. In can also be the underlying source of chronic email overload and poor email etiquette as your respond in haste to new emails.
Are you an email junkie? Check -download our Email Addiction self-assessment tool.
Here are three more tips to help you on the road to being less of an email junkie and freeing up some time for other tasks which might have a more positive impact on your productivity and health.
Tags: email addiction, email management, email overload
Last week’s UK launch of Clean Out Your Inbox Week seems to have been a great success. I am still sorting through all the emails, tweets and other messages. So please bear with me and a summary will be available at the end of the week.
The launch of our new Email Addiction self-assessment tool seemed to hit a hot spot. One of the problems with this sort of addiction is that there are no drugs to treat the affliction. It all has to be driven by personal behavioural change and from within yourself. As Susan Maushart’s book The Winter of Out Disconnect shows you might also find another you and another hidden skills set.
Here are five ways to start gently curing the curse of this modern day drain on productivity.
More tips and hints on Twitter this week.
Tags: email addiction, email overload
What picture of the sender does an email convey which contains, spelling mistakes, poor grammar and is badly structured? To me, it’s one of a sloppy person who does not really care, an email written in haste maybe? For many of my clients such emails can be very expensive especially when the contents are incorrect and they end up in court as evidence.
Alternatively, either a prospect or client feels the sloppy email is a reflection of the service they either are or will receive. The question which often comes up in workshops is ‘should an email be as perfect as a letter’? In a word ‘yes’, regardless of whether it is internal or external. Why worry about internal communications? They so often slip outside, forwarded carelessly and in haste.
Moreover, sloppy emails often result in more email overload because either you need to read and re-read the email to decipher what the sender is saying or you play endless rounds on unnecessary email ping-pong. For some of my clients this can be very costly and especially when English is not the mother tongue: shipments are missed, products specifications wrongly interpreted. Has this ever happened to you?
Here are three tips on good email etiquette for the content:
What are your top tips? Do you think an email should be as perfect as a letter?
Tags: email etiquette, email overload
When you open an email which do you prefer, Hi, Dear, Fred or no salutation? A recent survey we conducted reveled that ‘Dear’ is still regarded as the most professional greeting (66%) followed by Name (33%) and Hi (13%). No greeting is felt to be unprofessional and sloppy.
OK, so you open with a professional salutation, the content is grammatically correct and there are no spelling errors. (We should be so lucky!) What about how you close the email? What do you prefer, Cheers, your sincerely, kind regards or nothing?
Our survey revealed that Cheers is not professional (55%) and seen as sloppy by some (13%) as are smiley icons (75%). The most professional signs off are either kind regards or best wishes (67%).
Am I just a grumpy old women, part of a bye gone era of business (Generation X) or a seasoned business women trying to maintain standards?
What is you option on the best email etiquette to open and close an email?
Tags: email etiquette, email sign off
By email (as the sender), how long do you have to make an impression on the recipient? Maximum, five seconds, before they form an opinion of you (the sender), for better or worse. That goes for every aspect of business be it internal and external communications, eg job applications, journalists, prospects, etc. Often it’s for worse. Stefan Stern’s article ‘Is the vehicle registered in your name‘ prompted me to reflect on the current state of email etiquette or rather lack of it.
How you open, close and construct an email is your email dress code. Sloppy email, sloppy you. Professional email and it makes one feel I’d like to do business with this person. The way an email is framed can make or break a business relationship.
Let us not forget that for most businesses an email is still a formal communication. Indeed, it bears your business’s/organisation’s name, not to mention your own name.
Yet, when was the last time you had any email etiquette training? Never. You are not alone. Here is the most commonly and frequently used business communications tool and yet our surveys show that less than 30% of business people are ever given any guidelines on what is acceptable and what is not. In part of course the standard of today’s email etiquette is also a reflection of the appalling standard of school teaching. But that’s another story.
For example what guidelines are there in your organisation/business on:
These are some of the items covered in this week’s blogs.
Meanwhile, please feel free to use my Email Etiquette Checklist to audit a few of the emails you recently sent.
Tags: email etiquette, email management, Email training