Think Before Clicking Send

On June 30, 2011 in his N.Y. Times column, David Pogue described the deluge of emails each of us receives. It's a plague inflicted upon us by our friends. To help solve the problem he refereced ten suggestions by Chris Anderson of ted.com in an Email Charter of things we can do to improve the situation. Pogue added his own 5 items and I added one more for a total of sixteen, as you can see below.

This is the fundamental rule. As the message sender, the onus is on YOU to minimize the time your email will take to process. Even if it means taking more time at your end before sending. Critical to this is the use of a subject line entry that is an accurate synopsis of the email's contents.

Let's mutually agree to cut each other some slack. Given the email load we're all facing, it's OK if replies take a while coming and if they don't give detailed responses to all your questions. No one wants to come over as brusque, so please don't take it personally. We just want our lives back!

Start with a subject line that clearly labels the topic, and maybe includes a status category [Info], [Action], [Time Sens] [Low Priority]. Use crisp, muddle-free sentences. If the email has to be longer than five sentences, make sure the first provides the basic reason for writing. Avoid strange fonts and colors.

It is asking a lot to send someone an email with four long paragraphs of turgid text followed by "Thoughts?". Even well-intended-but-open questions like "How can I help?" may not be that helpful. Email generosity requires simplifying, easy-to-answer questions. "Can I help best by a) calling b) visiting or c) staying right out of it?!"

cc's are like mating bunnies. For every recipient you add, you are dramatically multiplying total response time. Not to be done lightly! When there are multiple recipients, please don't default to 'Reply All'. Maybe you only need to cc a couple of people on the original thread. Or none.

Some emails depend for their meaning on context. Which means it's usually right to include the thread being responded to. But it's rare that a thread should extend to more than 3 emails. Before sending, cut what's not relevant. Or consider making a phone call instead.

Don't use graphics files as logos or signatures that appear as attachments. Time is wasted trying to see if there's something to open. Even worse is sending text as an attachment when it could have been included in the body of the email.

If your email message can be expressed in half a dozen words, just put it in the subject line, followed by EOM (= End of Message). This saves the recipient having to actually open the message. Ending a note with "No need to respond" or NNTR, is a wonderful act of generosity. Many acronyms confuse as much as help, but these two are golden and deserve wide adoption.

You don't need to reply to every email, especially not those that are themselves clear responses. An email saying "Thanks for your note. I'm in." does not need you to reply "Great." That just cost someone another 30 seconds.

If we all agreed to spend less time doing email, we'd all get less email! Consider calendaring half-days at work where you can't go online. Or a commitment to email-free weekends. Or an 'auto-response' that references this charter. And don't forget to smell the roses.

You might think that you're clever by signing up for one of those anti-spam services that require e-mail senders to take a test on a Web page, proving that we're human. But you have a lot of nerve sending me an e-mail question — and then blocking my reply. I don't have time to take your little humanity test. The worst part: I don't discover that you're blocking my reply until AFTER I've gone to the trouble of writing it.

When you send out jokes or those insipid 'heartwarming' anecdotes, don't just put everyone you know into the To: line. Instead, put all your addressees into the BCC (blind carbon copy) line. We'll still get your e-mail blast, but we won't see each others' e-mail addresses. You're preserving our privacy and saving us the scrolling through six inches of address information.

On the same topic (jokes and insipid tales): before you pass them on, clean up those carets (>>>>>>) that have accumulated from all the forwarding. They make the things impossible to read. (Paste the message into Word; use Find and Replace to search for the ">" character and replace it with nothing.)

I roll my eyes at the nine-sentence legal disclaimer that some companies insist on stamping at the bottom of every single message. I've got news for you: that confidentiality disclaimer has never wound up protecting a company from whatever it's supposed to protect them from. When your actual e-mail message is only a fraction as long as your legal disclaimer, you look like an idiot.

If you're replying to a message that had a lot of different statements or questions, consider clicking after each response-requiring sentence, hitting Return, and typing your answer there. The result looks like a conversation, and makes it clear what you're referring to. (But if you're supplying only one response, put it up top so we don't have to scroll down.)

We all receive dire warnings from our friends via email. Virus warnings, health suggestions, product dangers ... at least 99% of which are falacious. They seem to end with a phrase like, "... and forward this to all your friends." Most of these are just lies, including statements that it was fact checked. Don't be a spam enabler. Never forward these emails unless you are willing take personal responsibility for the harm falacious information can cause. Remember, bad advice could kill someone.
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We don't all have the same interests or take on what is important or humorous. If you send something that is not of interest to the recipient, it becomes an irritant. Unless you are 110% sure that the person will REALLY want to see the thing, not send it.
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Stop Forwarding Crap