Email Best Practices 2.0

Five reasons for sticking to one topic per email

I’m referring to the emails that contain one topic, then BTW … here comes an unrelated one (emails with many related points are fine).

1   Task management gets harder

To your recipient, each email is a task. Busy people love the satisfaction of actioning and clearing an email within a couple minutes.

Emails containing more than one topic feel heavy and require some juggling. If there’s only time to partially reply, the email needs to stick around – not very motivating when the mission is to clear out the Inbox quickly.

More likely, the email will get passed over until there’s “more time.”

2   Partial or delayed response

We’ve all experienced this: a response to one item and silence on the others. What happened? With great intentions, your respondent likely only had time for one item (the easy one) then got busy and forgot about the others. Then there’s that awkwardness of following-up by referring to items in an old email your correspondent thought was dealt with.

What if you need an answer on one item this week, but the other one can wait. Sometimes people wait until they have all the answers before responding. Also, it’s just human nature to defer emails that appear to require more effort. Think about all the times you’ve skipped past emails that looked hard.

3   Awkward to forward

People love forwarding email (and delegating). If your second topic was perfect for your recipient to delegate, he’d have to pull it out and send it in a separate email. That’s much harder than simply clicking Forward on a single-topic email.

4   Longer emails

The more topics the longer the email. Shorter emails are more likely to be read (and read sooner), and are more mobile-friendly.

Note also that not all emails are read to completion. You may find items near the bottom get missed (More on inverted-pyramid writing in a separate topic).

5   Their subjects are surprisingly awkward to write

So awkward that we get lazy and write ones like “Two things.” Pretty goofy, especially when referring to it later.

Doesn’t this create even more emails?

YES, more emails that work and fewer emails that don’t work!