Email Best Practices

Fifth in a Five Part Series, running this entire week

Here are the four key points from this week’s email series plus six additional time-saving email practices.  

But first, here’s that mind-blowing stat one more time: You spend the equivalent of at least 40 10-hour days doing NOTHING but handling email.  If you ponder that long enough, you’ll see that getting serious about improving your email efficiency is perhaps the highest-value time management and practice management activity in which you can engage.

1. Help readers focus on your message by making subject lines specific, and using prefixes and suffixes to

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Fourth in a Five Part Series, running this entire week

We’re returning in this SuccessTip to the subject of subject lines — specifically, the use of 3-letter acronyms at the end of the subject line that saves reading time and reduces email ping-pong.

EOM = End of Message (when the entire content of your communication is contained within the subject field)
NRN = No Reply Needed (or its close cousin, NTN – No Thanks Needed)

What’s the rationale, the value, of using these acronyms?

Depending on how your recipients’ preview pane is set up, they don’t have …

Third in a Five Part Series, running this entire week

Who are your top email offenders?  That is, who are the people in your professional life who send you the most problematic email messages?

They’re easy to identify: Sort your inbox by Sender and see, first of all, who sends the most email by volume.  Then, determine who sends the most email that’s lengthy, unclear, or unneeded (e.g., it’s forwarded or replied-to-all unnecessarily).

List your top five offenders.  Then, determine the most important upgrade each person could make in their email behavior that would make your life easier. …

Second in a Five Part Series, running this entire week

Lest you need any more convincing that getting a better handle on email is a profoundly important objective, consider this: If you send and receive a total of 50 emails on each of the 240 work days in a year, you’re processing 12,000 messages per year.   At two minutes per message on average, you’re spending 24,000 minutes – or 400 hours a year – on email.  That’s an astounding 40 ten-hour days a year.  (And these numbers are conservative.)

As I mentioned yesterday, this week’s SuccessTips are devoted to …

First in a Five Part Series, to run this entire week.

If there ever was a business-related resolution for 2012 worth making and keeping, a top candidate would be to get control of your email.

So, as we head into prepping for next year, these five SuccessTips will present highlights from a state of the art approach to email management called Get Control™.  (The Get Control training programs have been hailed as transformative by small businesses and Fortune 500 companies alike.)

Their approach to email involves several key concepts including reducing the amount of email you send (and thus …

You hit Send by accident before the email is complete.  You send it to the wrong person.  You left something out (or you should have left something out).   You know that “arrggg!” the instant you realize the email is on its way.   Then you spend time writing again, worrying about the impact, and/or writing another email to explain yourself.

Want to avoid most of those situations forever?  Here’s a two minute solution:  Set up a “rule” that automatically delays every outgoing email by one or two minutes.

Here’s how to do it in Outlook (and this will still …