11/ 21/ 2002
by Charles R. McConnell
No modern business technology is more misused and abused than email. If you have to spend a third to half of your email time sorting through unimportant communications and personal information before getting into pertinent messages, your email is out of control. To bring it under control, consider the following suggestions:
- Emphasize deleting rather than reading. In most instances a quick look at the subject line along with your knowledge of the sender will indicate whether a message should be read in full. If a full reading isn't needed, delete it.
- Similar to the age-old advice about handling each incoming piece of paper only once, try to do the same with each email message. When you open and read a message, reply to it, forward it, delete it or put it away in an electronic folder. Don't let messages accumulate. They fill up your inbox and increase the chances of important messages getting lost in the clutter.
- When sending a message, use a clear, understandable subject line that tells the addressee in a few words what to expect of the communication.
Also make sure that your employees are aware of proper email etiquette. Email brings out the worst in many writers of business communications. Misunderstandings abound because so many users simply dash off messages minus the care they might apply to letters or memos. Some who would never allow a letter to go out containing obvious errors think nothing of emailing unedited ramblings devoid of capitalization and normal punctuation, overflowing with misspellings and incorrect terms.
A wise man named Blaise Pascal once said of his correspondence, "I have made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it short." Editing a letter takes time, but we usually do so. What's different about an email message that makes us forget the need to edit and clarify? Perhaps it's the seeming immediacy of email, the feeling it provides of talking directly to someone via the computer screen. But we forget that the key element present in dealing with someone face-to-face--immediacy of feedback--is missing in email. Feedback is delayed, and all too often it becomes necessary to trade messages back and forth to achieve the appropriate transfer of meaning. Far better to edit and rewrite--and certainly spell-check--before sending each message. Clarity of content is most likely to accompany clarity of presentation.
Think of email as one of a subset of tools in that versatile toolkit known as the personal computer. Like any good tool, to retain its usefulness, keep it in good order and use it for its intended purposes only.
