Point Lookout: a free weekly publication of Chaco Canyon Consulting
Volume 5, Issue 18;   May 4, 2005: Email Antics: IV

Email Antics: IV

by

Nearly everyone I know complains that email is a real time waster. Yet much of the problem results from our own actions. Here's Part IV of a little catalog of things we do that help waste our time.
Thor's Hammer, Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah, USA

Thor's Hammer, Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah, USA. Courtesy U.S. National Park Service.

When we waste time with email because of our own actions, complaining bitterly about it doesn't make much sense. To get control of email, we have to change how we work with it. Here's Part IV of a little catalog of ways to waste time with email. See "Email Antics: III," Point Lookout for January 14, 2004, for more.

Gossip about people in a message, then accidentally send it to them, too
Gossiping in email is dangerous. Even if you don't accidentally send the gossip to the wrong people, someone else can, at any time. It's called the "Forward" button.
Assume that the sender is the actual sender
Most often, the From does contain the actual sender's name and address. But there are viruses, spammers, and others in the world who know how to "spoof" the From, with malice in mind. Before you launch a tirade, consider whether the person in the From really is the sender.
Age your inbox
Aging a message in your inbox before answering might be OK, but would you like one of your urgent queries to be treated that way? Your delaying might be a serious inconvenience to your correspondent. If you really are so busy that you can't reply fully, send a short note explaining the delay and estimating when you can respond.
Print a message before reading
Unless you Humor is culture-specific,
and often personal.
Tag your humor somehow.
have a health reason for printing before reading, get used to the twenty-first century. Learn to read directly from your display. If your display is hard to read, change the default font and colors to something you like better. After you've read the message, you can print it if it's important enough. Most of the truly important messages still come to you on paper anyway.
Forget that humor is cultural — even microcultural
Humor is culture-specific, and often personal. That's why we so often disagree about what (or who) is funny. Assume that some people won't understand your humor, or worse, that they'll understand it but don't think it's funny. Tag your humor somehow — smileys work pretty well. Seriously. ;^)
Use sarcasm
Sarcasm is usually obvious in live conversation, when we can use voice tone, body language, and facial expressions to signal the sarcasm. In email, sarcasm is dangerous, because the tone of the voice in your head as you write isn't attached to the message. The consequences of misunderstanding can be truly horrible. If you must use sarcasm, indicate it in some explicit way, such as: <Begin sarcasm>attaching to the message a drawing of a hammer that recipients can use to hit themselves over the head until they get it<End sarcasm>.

If you do some of these, and you'd like to stop, tack this list on your wall. Highlight the ones you want to avoid, and review it once in a while to see how you're doing. Be patient, expect lapses, and celebrate your victories. First in this series  Go to top Top  Next issue: Nine Positive Indicators of Negative Progress  Next Issue

101 Tips for Writing and Managing EmailAre you so buried in email that you don't even have time to delete your spam? Do you miss important messages? So many of the problems we have with email are actually within our power to solve, if we just realize the consequences of our own actions. Read 101 Tips for Writing and Managing Email to learn how to make peace with your inbox. Order Now!

Where There's Smoke There's EmailAnd if you have organizational responsibility, you can help transform the culture to make more effective use of email. You can reduce volume while you make content more valuable. You can discourage email flame wars and that blizzard of useless if well-intended messages from colleagues and subordinates. Read Where There's Smoke There's Email to learn how to make email more productive at the organizational scale — and less dangerous. Order Now!

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This article in its entirety was written by a human being. No machine intelligence was involved in any way.

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Related articles

More articles on Effective Communication at Work:

FeedbackFeedback Fumbles
"Would you like some feedback on that?" Uh-oh, you think, absolutely not. But if you're like many of us, your response is something like, "Sure, I'd be very interested in your thoughts." Why is giving and receiving feedback so difficult?
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When people relate stories at work, what seems important to one person can feel irrelevant to someone else. Being subjected to one irrelevant detail after another can be as exasperating as being told repeatedly to get to the point. How can we find a balance?
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Some people insist that conversations reach their personally favored conclusions, no matter what others want. Here are some of their tactics.
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Ramblers are people who can't get to the point. They ramble, they get lost in detail, and listeners can't follow their logic, if there is any. How can you deal with ramblers while maintaining civility and decorum?
A VoiceStation 500 speakerphone by PolycomInterrupting Others in Meetings Safely: II
When we feel the need to interrupt someone who's speaking in a meeting, to offer a view or information, we would do well to consider (and mitigate) the risk of giving offense. Here are some techniques for interrupting the speaker in situations not addressed by the meeting's formal process.

See also Effective Communication at Work and Writing and Managing Email for more related articles.

Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout

A meeting in a typical conference roomComing April 3: Recapping Factioned Meetings
A factioned meeting is one in which participants identify more closely with their factions, rather than with the meeting as a whole. Agreements reached in such meetings are at risk of instability as participants maneuver for advantage after the meeting. Available here and by RSS on April 3.
Franz Halder, German general and the chief of staff of the Army High Command (OKH) in Nazi Germany from 1938 until September 1942And on April 10: Managing Dunning-Kruger Risk
A cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect can create risk for organizational missions that require expertise beyond the range of knowledge and experience of decision-makers. They might misjudge the organization's capacity to execute the mission successfully. They might even be unaware of the risk of so misjudging. Available here and by RSS on April 10.

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