As the Meeting Cost Calculator illustrates, people are increasingly aware of the cost of pointless and long-winded meetings. This is always a crucial consideration – in person meetings, however, is easy to recognize that the CEO or VP are sitting there tapping their fingers. With email distribution lists we tend to lose this consideration.
Every office I’ve worked in has utilized email distribution lists – from department, group, or even hobby related (we even had beer@ and cycling@ for one company). Hobby-related lists might be exceptions but for a department-related email you should be very considerate of what the cost is to sending your email. 10 people spending 5 minutes reading your email is an hour of wasted time. Do you want to waste the CEOs day?
Here are some things to consider before hitting Ctrl-S on your next email.
- Make sure you at least answer one key question: So what?
- Why should people care about your email?
- Why are you sending this email in the first place? It’s an FYI, it should include callouts as to why you’re distributing it to the group and not an individual.
- PS – if you’re constantly sending “FYI†emails I’ll tell you they’re getting deleted immediately.
- Apply your SEO skills to the subject line.
- Think about the keywords in the email and write a concise subject line. Action items and deadlines are good. Niceties (Like “heyâ€) are a waste of space.
- Include Who/What/Where/When/How/Why
- Basic elementary school. I like using bullet form for each to make sure the messaging is clear and a quick read.
- Use proper punctuation and sentences.
- Brevity
- Re-read your email. If a sentence doesn’t add value, delete it.
- Include next steps or actionable items if there are any.
- Be specific – it will remove a lot of confusion if you simply tell people what you need from them. Politely, of course.
If you want even more detail (or examples) Harvard Business School wrote a nice piece in 2004 on email management that’s still very relevant. (And I love this idea from HBS, “One CEO I’ve worked with charges staff members five dollars from their budget for each e-mail she receives.â€)
I always need to work on improving my email management so I’d love to hear what works for you.
