Email Best Practices 2.0

We’re getting very good at understanding “short”

Twitter, SMS, and now film reviews in under four words – Icy Dead People. Short is trending!

If verbose is your comfort zone, try scaling it way back and see what happens. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Good things may happen

Careful – short doesn’t mean slapdash

You risk being impolite, inattentive, frivolous. Choose your words thoughtfully and always write to get results. “Friendly but direct” seems to work best for business email.

Longer emails have their place. I’m just saying that many of us (and I definitely include me) would get better results if we went shorter much more often.

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!

Compose your emails in this order for optimum results:

This simple best practice can make a big difference, especially for important new emails.

What type are you?

An email-related stress study (see end of article) from the UK uncovered three dominant attitudes toward email:

We see many business people in the “driven” category but we also see too many who fit the “stressed” profile – not only does email not work for them, it causes workplace stress. “Relaxed” is out there, but certainly less common.

We find this simple classification based on attitude very helpful because positive change so often starts with understanding our own attitude and emotions.

What creates stress? Synchronous communication!

Asynchronous communication is non-interactive – you use email mostly for exchanging factual information (much like one does in a letter). It is comparatively stress-free. Synchronous communication is interactive – used for discussions, reviewing options, and nuance typically involving lots of back and forth (topics more suited for a telephone call).

Pressure and stress increase with interactivity.

We tell clients email is not well suited for synchronous (highly interactive) communication to help increase their overall communication effectiveness. This is the first study we have found that speaks to the added pressure and stress synchronous email causes. It’s a reasonable guess that the anxiety comes from both the need to respond and having to manage more and longer email conversations.

What’s the best practice?

Simple. If you are feeling pressured or stressed with email, consider using other communication channels for some of your email. Identify the email conversations in your Inbox that are failing or losing focus and recast them into personal meetings or telephone calls.

In general, try to use email for the more non-interactive (factual-type items) and other channels for anything you think is discussion-oriented, potentially emotional, sensitive, or which may lead to many emails (e.g., more than 3).

But let’s be realistic too. It’s simply impractical to achieve this across the board. However, if you can shift your attitude even a little – even to just recognize that email doesn’t work for all communication types – we believe your stress level may just shift along with it.

About the study

To see the study click “The influence of self-esteem and locus of control on perceived email-related stress” (M. Hair – University of Paisley; K.V. Renaud – University of Glasgow; J. Ramsay – University of Paisley – 2006).

The study is interesting and goes well beyond what I took from it to press my case above. As the title suggests, it set out to measure two specific personality traits related to email stress. The three-fold typology (relaxed, driven, stressed) surfaced as dimensions from the exploratory factor analysis that was conducted (and it was deemed statistically reliable).

One interesting result: it was found that low self-esteem is associated with the “driven” orientation.

Smileys – everyone says they have no place in the workplace. Used with a little thought, I think they are sometimes exactly what’s needed.

A very professional colleague of mine used them. I remember first thinking .. what? Then I noticed how much they helped. In fact, he used them to great effect and only where a little emotion was truly needed.

Let’s face it, email needs all the intonation it can get. In the study, Egocentrism over E-Mail (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005) it was suggested that we misunderstand the tone of emails about 50 percent of the time.

The ‘Thanks’ email – Another pet peeve of some email experts is when someone responds with just “Thanks .” I say, if you think someone would appreciate your thank-you, just do it. Don’t worry about the extra email. We all appreciate knowing what we did helped someone.

Okay, I’m not suggesting blanket use of either of these (be particularly judicious with smileys). All I’m saying is …

Don’t be afraid to pimp your email style

It’s faster for me to reply to everyone in my own style, but I’m often more successful if I think first about who I’m emailing. Some need quicker replies than others, some need more words, some need serious cow-towing , and I know some who won’t read past the first few lines.

So I’ve learned to adjust, I’m breaking the rules more. It’s working and it’s a little more fun.

This month I published an article, Managing Email and the ‘Get Organized’ Myth, in The Practical Lawyer, an American Law Institute-American Bar Association periodical (let me know if you’d like me to email a copy to you).

Drawing on research papers on email overload and email stress, one of my subthemes was “Yes, email is hard”, and I explained why. What I found interesting was that several people who reviewed drafts of the paper said they felt better knowing that not being able to keep up with their email was not their fault.

This piece is along the same line. Perhaps it will make us feel better knowing why we check our Inboxes so often (or at least one theory of why) … even if we continue to do it.

What compels us to constantly check for new email?

Tom Stafford, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, explains that checking for email is not unlike pulling the lever of a slot machine:

“Both slot machines and email follow something called a ‘variable interval reinforcement schedule’ which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits. This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there’s something wonderful – an invite out, or maybe some juicy gossip – and I get a reward.”

Of course we have to check our email …

The question is how often?

The currently promoted practice is to turn off all alerts and notifications and just check our inboxes a few times per day. Yet in a recent study on workplace email stress it was found that people who get a lot of email actually experience less email stress if they check for new email continuously throughout the day.

It’s perfectly reasonable to want to know when important, urgent email arrives. But here’s the rub. For most of us, all email arrives into our Inboxes without distinction, all seemingly important and urgent until we look at it. As a result, we find ourselves clinging to the tops of our Inboxes, scanning over the same inbox emails repeatedly in fear of missing something we need to act on.

What are we to do?

For some people, checking at specific times during the day works well for them. If that’s you, then great.

If you need to check more often, or even very, very often, at least be sure to find a way to check only your important email. We show clients how to bring their important emails forward so when they do check they are at least not distracted by unimportant emails. We also encourage them (gently) to check less often, or at least be more conscious about when and why they check. As satisfying as it may be, doing it simply out of habit can be a real time waster.

Sources and further reading

I first read of this research in John Freeman’s book The Tyranny of E-mail. John shows email’s darker side in an entertaining way. I later read an interesting article Breaking the Email Compulsion by Suw Charman-Anderson.

And on and on … eight emails and several days later, Dan still doesn’t have a date for a simple meeting.

The time-to-take-action approach

In contrast, suppose Dan had instead written:

A few reasons why I think this is better:

• Dan assumed everyone would likely want to meet, so took the small chance to skip the request for buy-in (thereby saving both emails and time).
• Dan knew the next step was setting up the meeting and anticipated all the meeting logistics – even that Peter might be wondering who would chair.
• Dan made it easy for each recipient to reply. All they had to do was check their calendar – clearly an email they could handle within a minute or so (increasing the chances it would get answered quickly).

Too obvious?

In theory, yes. But for whatever reason open-ended emails are too common in practice.

I don’t mean to suggest we should take the lead on everything – we’d appear too pushy. However, it’s easy to see how taking a moment to anticipate what the next step or response might be would eliminate many emails (good) and minimize costly time delays (even better).

When we ask clients to look at their task management-related emails, it’s surprising how many there really are. The problem is that email wasn’t designed for task management. Tasks are too important and it’s too easy to miss one if there are too many.

What to do?

Try this. Have a look at the types of emails in your Inbox. As a quick research exercise:

1. Identify the emails related to task management;
2. For each type (assignment, revisions, status, reporting, renegotiation, etc.) assess how appropriate it is for the email channel;
3. Consider how you can handle these types by non-email ways (status meetings, reports);
4. Open a discussion with your team to decide on a communication best practice for managing tasks.

I think you too will be surprised how many emails you can readily move to other communication channels. And you may well see where the communication hot spots are with your team members.