Posts Tagged 'email'

Why – and How – You Must Teach Employees Professional Email Composition

Posted on November 22nd, 2012 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

Whatever happened to the art of message composition? In times past, people communicated by letters written on paper, and there were excellent incentives for applying optimal composition. People of good upbringing learned how to write a proper letter as part of their general “liberal arts” education, and children got the basics in school when writing essays and assignments. All aspects of a good letter, from polite salutation to clarity of content, were taught – and scrutinized by both senders and recipients. Writing a poorly crafted letter was shameful and derided; and so when people reached the workplace they knew how.. Read more

How the Shape of the Earth Dictates Email’s Longevity

Posted on November 15th, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Check out my guest post on the Mesmo Consultancy Blog: If we all hate coping with email, how come it’s still here? In this post I consider the paradox of email’s extreme longevity  (over four decades), considering how much we love to hate it. Like the Fax machine, its antiquity doesn’t stop it from remaining alive and well. In my view this has to do with the earth being (with all due respect to Thomas Friedman) a round planet. Those of us who help reduce email overload had better understand the mechanism underlying the allure of email, so this is.. Read more

No Email Day: a Misunderstood but Promising Solution to Information Overload

Posted on September 21st, 2012 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

A sure-fire way to jolt awake an audience in a lecture about Information Overload is to mention the solution known as “No Email Day” (NED) or “Zero Email Friday”. As soon as people hear the name, there is guaranteed to be a major protest. A whole day without email? This would never work! I wouldn’t blame you if you reacted the same way. How could it possibly work? And yet it does work, quite well, if you have the courage to try it and the wisdom to do it right. The problem is possibly in the name: “Zero email day”.. Read more

How You Can Stop the Abuse of Reply to All

Posted on August 14th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

Reply to All: probably the most hated feature of Email. How do I know? Because whenever I work with clients to reduce Email Overload, one request pops up right at the beginning: Can we put a stop to the abuse of Reply All? Yes, you can. But before I talk about solutions, let’s consider why anyone would misuse Reply to All in the first place, if they hate it so? Part of the problem, and the reason the feature is retained, is that it is really about enabling two very different functions: Conversation: When communicating within  a small team, it.. Read more

A laudable approach to paring distributions

Posted on July 22nd, 2012 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

I recently received a message from a manager in a hi-tech corporation who had applied a technique I’ve never seen before to the matter of removing unnecessary people from dist lists. The context is that I was corresponding with his boss, who delegated to my current sender; and the latter decided to drop the boss from the continuing exchange, removing him from the addressee list. So far so good, rare but not unheard of. The twist was that at the start of the email this guy had put in the line (Removing Joe from the thread) Not only had he.. Read more

Organizational altruism

Posted on June 23rd, 2012 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

Following a lecture on information overload my audience – a management forum in a midsized company – was discussing in small breakout groups norms for improving their messaging effectiveness. When the conclusions were read to the entire forum, we had many of the usual useful suggestions, but one team had a truly unusual contribution. They proposed that when one receives an email with a question that is best answered by someone else in the company, one should not forward it to the appropriate recipient right away. That is, say I’m the expert on left-threaded widgets and I get a mail.. Read more

Is email going away?

Posted on April 23rd, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Every now and then someone proclaims that email has outlived its usefulness (some, groaning under their Inboxes, might say outstayed its welcome), and is on the way out. How about it? It might seem that these pronouncements of doom for the world’s most widely used messaging channel have some basis. After all, the young generation – Generation Y – really prefer to conduct much of their communication via Facebook; it is said that some universities don’t bother to assign email accounts to their students because they don’t need them anymore. And even in the enterprise, we have that startling declaration.. Read more

They saw the SUN!

Posted on March 19th, 2012 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

An argument broke out during one of my lectures, about whether a “No Email Day” could work in the organization I was speaking at. Most attendees felt it couldn’t – not unless the electric power were cut! And then they recalled that this had once happened to them… Turns out that in a large building power has been lost for a number of hours and all mail was inaccessible. Now, you’d think this would be a negative experience in their memory – but it was not. They all started describing it to me excitedly: how everybody in the building had come.. Read more

We’ll talk!

Posted on February 9th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions

An all too common pattern of one to one communication these days involves a lengthy ping pong of email messages going back and forth. One piece of advice I often give is “after a few times, just pick up the phone!” Well, I realized that one friend I have, a college faculty member, is being more proactive than that. This guy, a well-connected Digital Native, ends many of his one to one mails with “We’ll talk”, or “Talk to me <phone number>”, or “Set 30 minutes with <his secretary>”. What this smart fellow is doing, is to send across briefly.. Read more

How a real Pro manages Email

Posted on November 25th, 2011 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Email overload tends to go up the more senior you get; executive level managers can easily get a few hundred incoming work-related messages a day. This is so commonplace that they don’t even stop to complain about it; they either cope with the crushing stress or they delegate their Inbox processing to an assistant. I’ve known one glaring exception, however. I knew one senior manager, a VP  of a hi-tech Fortune 500, who had a perennially near-empty inbox, and was receiving a paltry few dozen emails a day. I inquired as to how he got to this enviable state, and.. Read more