How to Avoid the Top Five Email Mistakes

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Office e-mail takes time. Stop making these 5 e-mail mistakes and you could save up to 15 work days a year!

Steps

1. Avoid using confusing subject lines. People find confusing subject lines frustrating because they're having to open emails that they wouldn't necessarily open if time had been taken to write a clear and descriptive subject line. Heading an e-mail something like "What's going on?!" or "Can You Do This?" etc., encourages opening but tells nothing and if the content is trivial, repetitive or simply targeted at getting a person's attention for a minor issue, you won't be in the good books.
   
2. Quit replying to just say thank you. It might surprise you but it is estimated that 90% of e-mail users don't want an e-mail that says "thanks". This takes additional energy to open the e-mail and read it just to read what you already know. A new trend is to include a line that says NTN - No Thanks Needed.
   
3. Get out of the habit of prioritizing your messages. There is nothing more irritating and presumptuous than assuming your e-mail request is higher in the queue than anybody else's, especially in a work context. Give the receiver the credit for working out themselves how to prioritize your message. Granted, there are certain instances when receipt required is needed for record keeping purposes or proof of receipt and there are other times when things are urgent (in which case, still consider if using the phone or making an internet voice call might be faster and more direct). But to mark every email as "Urgent! Receipt Required!!" or to call it "High Priority" or "Receipt Required" is not necessary and can be annoying and confusing to the receiver.
   
4. Reply to the critical person only. Using "Reply All", all the time creates returns in abundance and leaves messages languishing in the in-boxes of many people. Consider the consequences of receiving an email, hitting reply all and it goes out to twenty people and then those twenty people hit reply to all... It can compound very quickly into hundreds of thousands of emails. Once you hit reply all, everyone feels compelled to hit reply all as a means of keeping everyone in the loop because nobody knows who is meant to read it and who is not!
   
5. Learn to let go of writing long e-mails. You may feel you have a lot to say but truth is that e-mail communication creates a false sense of "listening". It's easy to keep writing away but the truth is - it isn't so easy to read all those gems of wisdom. Often just being clear and very concise and direct with the person is the best way to answer an email. If you need to go into greater depth, try a meeting, phone call or video conference. Or just break down the issues into small bites and raise them over time. Don't give the history of time if somebody just wants to know the time.
   

Tips

• Remember that breaking these rules can rebound on you negatively when people see an e-mail from you landing in their in-box. Tactics include avoiding opening your e-mails, having your e-mails sent directly to a folder marked "Deal with Later", or worst of all, automatically deleting anything from your address!
  

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Sources and Citations

• VideoJug A video of avoiding common e-mail mistakes. Original source of this article. Share with permission and appreciation.
  

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