During the average workday how many emails would you say you send out, or receive? Before, my ‘official’ emails were crafted painstakingly, edited for clarity, brevity and typos. At times when I would click ‘Send’ I said to myself “that was a good one my dear!” Sadly, I quickly learned that many recipients would not give my emails more than a cursory glance. It was like all they read were key words or the “For assistance, please contact me at 555.555.5555″ line.
Within seconds of clicking ‘Send’, my phone would be ringing with the recipient on the other end asking me to walk them through the login process! Most of the time this entailed sitting silently as the person umm-d and errm-d their way to the site- I would ’see’ them one-handedly mis-typing our URL…then I would listen for the creaking, sputtering sounds of their CPU crunching the data. Aaargh!
I have now switched to sending keywords-only emails. It’s working very well. Maybe I will start doing that with my blog posts too.
5 Comments
February 27, 2009 at 12:06 pm
I, on the other hand, am experiencing a different scenario. When I need to forward a case to the forces ‘up there’ for further decision making, I am required to write a well written story, complete with history and citations, provide my analysis upto the ‘hitch point’, and then proceed a little further with my recomendation of the situation,….after which i will receive a one line reply that goes like this, ” happy to go by your recommendation. kr. “
February 27, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Ha ha! That reminds me of this guy I worked for who would send 4 page emails to people, complete with attachments and footnotes…only for him to be disappointed when they would reply with an ‘OK’…I feel your pain. My most annoying one is when I fashion an argument for/against something, then the higher-up I send it to just calls me and expects me to go over everything…leaving me wondering “why did you ask for an email if you were just going to call me to discuss it?”…
February 28, 2009 at 12:27 pm
I once “crafted” a very intelligent email, complete with paragraph separation for the different issues needing to be addressed, 4 different PDF, Excel and Word Attachments, CCed to 7 different people – and I got a 1 WORD response simply saying “Approved”!!
But I guess sometimes it goes to the “cover your a**” kinda situations that usually come up 1 year after such email! Oh they joy of “corporate communication”
BTW – I still do the long winded email – you never know when the “approvers” are going to suffer selective amnesia
March 23, 2009 at 5:24 am
When working with clients who basically hold your organisation’s existence ransom, you must be very careful what you write to them. I always send the email to myself first (so i have lots of catherine to catherine emails in my inbox) and then read it an hour later so that i can edit and delete any rudeness or ‘bad’ words that may offend the client! When especially speaking to clients who are reluctant to respond, I use one thread of email so the client is aware of just how many times i have made the enquiry! If i call the client and the client is not in, i inlcude the fact that i had called in the same thread. So far, that has worked wonders in terms of getting a client to respond.
March 23, 2009 at 7:46 am
That’s a good idea to send it to yourself…’cause we’ve all had those moments where we send strongly worded emails without thinking about it, then we spend days waiting for the fallout
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