SET AN EXAMPLE: Cut to the chase and summarize, expert suggests
Donna Nebenzahl
Province
Office e-mailers can be trained in brevity. Photograph by : The Associated Press file photo
I took a couple of weeks off recently — and there were more than 300 e-mails waiting when I returned.
A list that long, no matter how many are duds, means a bunch of stressful hours deleting, answering queries or running around trying to figure out those answers.
Doesn’t matter that I’ve left an “out-of-office” reply on my e-mail. Unlike the “out-of-office” phone reply, which gives the person calling the opportunity to hang up, this one shows up only after the message is sent.
What’s the point of that?
Add to that the ease of sending e-mails for every little thing, and it’s no wonder we’re overwhelmed by this — yet another — supposed time-saver.
Consultant Stever Robbins was struggling with an even heavier burden — up to 100 bona fide e-mails daily — when he decided to do something about it.
Head of his own career-building company and a contributor on management issues to the Harvard Business School newsletter, Robbins describes himself as an “overwhelm wimp” — someone who really can’t handle being run ragged by e-mails and cellphones.
“Taming e-mails,” Robbins says, “means training senders to put the burden of quality back on themselves.”
The best way to start — naturally, since nothing works better than a good example — is with the e-mails that we send.
The first place to make the change is in the subject line of the e-mail, Robbins suggests.
Use it to summarize, not describe, so that the reader gets the full context of the message.
His example of a bad subject line, “Deadline discussion,” would be replaced with “Recommend we ship product April 25.”
Cut to the chase, in other words.
If you’re responding to a previous e-mail, Robbins suggests starting the message with enough information about the previous discussion to orient the reader.
And if you’re sending a response to a bunch of people, he suggests marking out each person with care.
By doing this, he says, you can “ask yourself why you’re sending to each recipient and let them know at the start of the message what they should do with it.”
In order to get things done, it’s necessary to make action requests clear, Robbins says.
“Summarize action items at the end of a message so everyone can read them at one glance,” he says.
And if you want to reach someone quickly, don’t assume they’ll see your e-mail right away. If they’re as snowed under as many of us are, chances are the best move is to pick up the phone.
The other side of the coin, of course, is how to read your own e-mails efficiently. Robbins suggests checking e-mail at defined times each day, maybe two or three times.
“When it’s e-mail-processing time, however, shut the office door, turn off the phone and blast through the messages,” he says.
To keep unnecessary e-mails at bay, Robbins offers the example of the CEO who charges staff members $5 from their budgets for each e-mail she receives.
Other methods he suggests are keeping answers so brief that senders realize you won’t be indulging them with long answers, and sometimes even ignoring e-mails so people realize the only way to get their message to you is to talk about it face-to-face.
Remember that.
© The Vancouver Province 2006