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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.
Do your emails stand out in the recipient’s crowded inbox? Rhymer Rigby’s article ‘Be authentic:What to wear at work’ in Monday’s FT prompted me to revisit the question of how do you make sure your email stand out in a crowded inbox and convey the right image.
Should an email be as perfect as a letter?
This question is posed frequently by clients, of all ages, all sectors and from business of all sizes. Some argue that email is an informal communication and that more lax rules, grammar, punctuation and layout are acceptable. Your email sends a signal about you and your business just as clearly as the clothes you wear send a message about you and your persona. The question then is dress down or keep to the smart business suit.
More often than not you and your email recipient will not have met let alone spoken. But within five seconds of reading your email the recipient will have formed a picture of you and it may not be the one you wanted to convey. Nonetheless, it is their picture and it determines the tenor of the relationship. Sloppy email (jeans and tee shirt) may reflects badly on you because it may suggest both you and your business are sloppy. For some clearly jeans and a tee shirt are acceptable and only you can decide.
Your email must therefore instantly convey the right tone and language just as the clothes you wear create an image of you. This ’email dress’ code must be carried through from the subject-line and initial greeting to your signature and disclaimer at its end if you want to convey a professional image. This blog has been based on material in Brilliant Email: how to win back time and increase your productivity.
Follow this week’s Tweets for daily tips the image you create through your email etiquette.
Tags: email best practice, email etiquette
Are your emails resource hungry or sustainable?
Email misuse significantly increases an organisation’s and an individuals carbon foot print. Getting the email traffic down in order to save energy is one of my pet grips.
It never ceases to amaze me how few people spring clean their inboxes. Yet, the bigger the inbox the more natural resources needed to run the email servers. The reply is usually either why should I waste my time, or servers are cheap. Fine if you don’t care about the businesses profitability and the environment. It’s funny because if you kept so much paper that you ran out of office space you would soon have a clear out. So why not do the same with email?
Meanwhile of course most cloud-based email services such as Gmail and Hotmail actively encourage big inboxes.
Then there are the emails themselves – all those long signature blocks with icons and endless straplines. The one which makes me most cross is ‘please consider the environment and don’t print this email unless absolutely necessary’.
Short simple emails are best and that includes the signature block. There is nothing more annoying and unprofessional than an email where more space is taken up by all the marketing and PR blurb than by the message itself. What a waste. Furthermore, icons embedded in the email use up even more storage space.
Then there are all the unnecessary emails sent primarily either to cover your backside or shout about how clever you are. More wasted processing resources (eg energy) and server space.
What about fancy fonts and colour? Heaven forbid you need to print these. What a waste of toner unless you remember to use the black and white printer. However, all too often a coloured email lures you to the colour printer.
My daily email tips for this week were planned to focus on email best practice and sustainability as a result of recent and future client projects. By chance I heard about Green Office Week happening in May.
Prepare for Green Office Week by taking steps to make your emails more sustainable and use the minimum of resources. For tips follow my Tweet at Emaildoctor.
Tags: email best practice, email overload, green office week
Will you be checking your email over the Easter break? Or will you be bold and switch off completely in order to recharging your batteries and have quality time with your family and friends? After all that is what holidays are about.
Checking your emails constantly is a sure way to drive up the stress and disrupt a holiday. It is not unheard of for a husband/wife to throw their other half’s expensive iphone/Blackberry in the sea. That’s a bit of a waste.
One way to help you resist the email honey trap is to leave your smart phone (Blackberry, iphone etc) safely at home and take just a conventional mobile phone.
If you can not make that leap of faith (and I confess I can not always) then reduce the number of times you check your email to at most twice (morning and evening). The best being once a day at the end of the day with drink in your hand. You will surprised at how much less pressing the emails look when seen through a glass of wine!..
What will you be doing whilst on leave – checking or going cold turkey?
Tags: email addiction, email best practice
Information overload is a prevalent disease of 21st Centuary business life, often predicated by email overload. We live in a predominantly push rather than pull information culture: this is one of the main causes of this disease. However, we have it within our personal power to change that culture and be far more vigilant about what information is thrown at us and often by email.
I have just sent out a reminder email about forthcoming some Brilliant Email Master Classes and was pleased to see that ten people ‘unsubscribe’ from my mailing list. No I am not a sadist, but simply delighted to see people taking my email best practice medicine.
To manage the risk of catching the information overload virus you need to be be ruthless about the emails which reach your inbox and hence reduce the email overload. In the first instance that means ‘unsubscribing’ from any mailing lists (internal and external) from which you receive information which you feel is not useful to you personally.
If that can not be done perhaps because either your mail server does not let you access the website or the sender has provided no unsubscribe mechanism then take alternative avoidance action. Try using:
Simply deleting unnecessary emails is both a waste of time (click here to check for yourself) and makes you very vulnerable to the information overload virus.
Eighty percent of what you really need comes from twenty percent of the information you receive. However, only you can identify which is the twenty percent for you. Then you and only you must prioritise and take suitable measure to avoid being laid low by the email overload and hence information overload disease.
Tags: email best practice, email management, email overload
Email overload – ask someone to do something and the response is email me! How rude is that? Last week’s post on our total reliance on email was popular. That and my current client work prompted me to post a second blog on this theme of when to use an alternative to email.
One of the most annoying comment I receive when phoning someone is ‘can you put that in an email’. If it’s a client sometimes it’s hard to say ‘no’, but with everyone else my solution is to forget! This has cost some people money as the call was to remind them to invoice me for their commission fee.
I find this the rudest response. If you have been asked to do a task, why do you need it in email? Are you suffering with dementia? Do you not have a device on which to make your own ‘To Do List’ (electronic or paper and pencil). Is it plain lazyness? Perhaps is it that you want an audit trail?
In my pocket/handbag there is always a pen and paper but perhaps that is because my parents owned a stationary business and my love of pens and paper has never left me!
Seriously, if someone asks you to do something, my management school says it is now your problem to remember and get on with it, but certainly not respond with ‘ can you put it an email’. That just compounds the cover my backside and litigious culture which now pervades most organisations.
The only exception is if you are having a corridor conversation in which you are seeding an idea with a senior executive.
What is your opinion and experience.
Tags: email best practice, email management, email overload, pen and paper