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Top tips from Mesmo Consultancy (and Associates) on how to save time and improve business and personal performance by ‘Taking Control of your Inbox’ and using proper business email etiquette.
‘People don’t read my emails’. This is one of most frequently cited sources annoyance. It begs the question who is to blame? The sender for poor email etiquette and not writing in such a way as to make it easy for the recipient to know either what you want or by when. Alternatively, is it the recipient who probably has 50+ unread emails in their inbox and just missed yours. Senders always blame the recipient’s for poor email etiquette and inbox management. Recipients always say they can instantly spot important emails regardless of how many are in their inbox!
Red email etiquette
In life, it is always important to make sure we manage and have control over what is within our power to do so. With email, this means how we write and signpost our emails. Do you include a priority marker? This is downright rude and nine out of ten times your email will be given a red card. After all we all hate aggressive behaviour. Instead take the assertive approach and at the end of the subject-line add ‘action by ….’
Bearing in mind that many people read their emails on a mobile device, they often don’t see past the first sentence. If they are reading emails on a full size PC, they may also be time poor. A rambling email can therefore easily be given a yellow card and parked for later reading.
Whereas emails written in newspaper style and which in the first sentence tell the reader what the email is about will get a blue card and be dealt with promptly.
Other aspects of:
Click here to further referee your email etiquette and what colour card the recipient might assign to your emails and hence whether or not it will be answered in a timely and proper manner.
See Brilliant Email: how to win back time and increase your productivity by Monica Seeley for more tips on how to capture and maintain recipient’s attention.
Tags: Blue email, Brilliant Email, Email colour, email etiquette, Monica Seeley, Red email, Yellow email
Even prior to the TalkTalk hack, password protection and the on going stream of email spoofs were a significant focus of the last few months. The latter are always phishing to relieve you very cheaply and easily of your hard earned money.
Tags: Articles of note, cybercrime, out of office message, password protection, Spam, Spoof emails, TalkTalk
The English language is complicated enough for those who did not learn Latin at school. Spell and grammar checkers are hailed as tools of the digital age which should make our lives easier. However, they are useless at picking up on the errors generated by using Homonyms. These are words which sound the same but are spelt differently. Here are some examples.
How often have you said you will arrange a meeting in mourning (for whom) when naturally you mean the morning? Certainly as one who struggles with mild dyslexia I have made many errors despite emails being be read on screen and paper and spell checked.
As if this is not enough, there are the Homophones, those words which sound and are spelt the same but have different meanings. These are so well illustrated by Lynne Truss’s book ‘ Eats Shoots and Leaves’. Surely a must for anyone who is either a grammar pedant or cares about their email etiquette. One of my favourite Homophones is ‘Rose’. For example:
Are we planting a rose before our partner rose from bed because they drank too much rose coloured wine last night?
There have been several articles recently about the importance of grammar in business and some have suggested that better grammar is linked to how high you climb the corporate greasy pole.
What is clear from Mesmo Consultancy’s studies is that grammatically correct emails help reduce email overload because they convey the right message right first time. Additionally, good email etiquette as in good grammar conveys a professional image and most importantly make it easy for the recipient to know what is being asked of them.
Next time before hitting send, pause, take the slow email approach and re-read before hitting send. Make sure the human touch pervades over the arrogance of the spell checker.
This is an edited extract from my new book Taking Control of Your Inbox due out in late November. Watch this space for more news.
Tags: Dr Monica E. Seeley, email etiquette, email overload, Executive Secretary, Grammar, Lynne Truss, Mesmo Consultancy, Slow email, Taking Control of Your Inbox
The holiday period was to some extent dominated by the Ashley Madison hacking and the havoc is wrecked for both organisations and individuals as summarized in this months blog and the on-going saga of Hilary Clinton’s emails sent on her personal account. In between there was a piece we noted about Finland now teaching keyboard skills rather than cursive (joined-up) writing.
The Ashley Madison story
Hilary Clinton email saga
The keyboard overtakes cursive writing
Tags: Ashley Madison, Cursive writing, email overload, Hilary Clinton, pen and paper, thank you emails
How well do you protect your on-line reputation to avoid an email disaster? The hacking of Ashley Madison website (the dating agency) provided some statutory lessons about how one’s reputation can be destroyed in a nano second. In a nutshell, this well known dating agency’s data was hacked. Details of about 33 million accounts were released including peoples sexual preferences and fantasies linked to their email address. They also cracked passwords and credit card information.
What made people and business’s more twitchy than usual was that names were associated with companies, because many were silly enough to use their business email address. Technology companies listed included Apple, HP, IBM Sony, Snapchat and Vodafone. Many others were Government officials and household business names.
As a result we have seen some people resigning from their jobs and at least one suicide.
This highly visible hack provides several very pertinent lessons both for us as individual users and corporately for the business. None are new. Perhaps the surprising fact is that so many people continued to forget to bolt the door securely on their on-line identity until it is too late.
Lesson 1 – never use your business email address for anything other than business unless it is an emergency. Use a personal email address for all social emails.
Lesson 2 – be very vigilant about what information you post on websites because In reality nothing is private on the internet. Several people paid to have their profile removed but it still turned up.
Lesson 3 – before hitting send and posting information think about the consequences to yourself should someone else find it, for example either through hacking or worse still close friend or partner.
Lesson 4 – set strong passwords. One survey revealed that over 120 people use simple ones like 123456. Click here for more about password management.
Lesson 5 – spend time developing a crisis management plan whether for your business or self in the event of such a disaster.
This won’t be the last high profile hack but hopefully some will take these five lesson seriously and especially use their business email address more cautiously to manage their own and their company image more carefully.
Call Mesmo Consultancy now to discuss how we have helped our clients to improve the management of their on-line reputation to avoid an email disaster like this and the Sony email disaster.
Tags: Ashley Madison, email disasters, email reputation, Hacking, Mesmo Consultancy, Password Management, password protection
