You've got mail

By Clive Shepherd

You've got mail! And it isn't always going to be Tom Hanks or Meg Ryan (depending on your persuasion) who is dropping you a line from cyberspace. More likely it's more of that 75% of your email that is of no practical use at all. Concerned that it is time we became 'masters of our own mail', Clive Shepherd sets out here some practical advice that might just give some fresh hope to struggling e-communicators.

Contents

Email - boon or burden?
Know when to use email
Be a responsible email user
Compose your messages with care
Minimise the e-load

Email - boon or burden?

If you believe the statistics we’re all at it. By 2001, half the population of the US will be doing it more than 500 million times a day¹. The Queen beat all but a handful of academics to it, by doing it for the first time in 1976. It is email. You only need to walk near a computer and someone will send you one. And then another. And then, on average, about 45 each day².

St the risk of adding to the overload, let’s get our facts straight. Three quarters of all email is of no practical use. Up to half of it is deleted without being read³. And contributing to this is the fact that less than half of us receive any training in electronic communications - and far less are taught how to reduce the email overload⁴.

Why are we doing it?
There’s at least three good reasons why we’re doing it:

• It’s fast and it’s cheap: Recent research⁵ draws this out conclusively. Here’s what it takes to send a 42 page document from New York to Tokyo:

		US$	Time
	Airmail	7.4	5 days
	Courier	26.25	24 hrs
	Fax	28.83	31 mins
	Internet email	0.1	2 mins

• It keeps us in touch: With email we can stay in the loop whether we’re at our desks, working from home, on client premises, in our hotel room or on the move. Now we don’t need to be connected to our organisation’s local area network, we can work with a laptop and a dial-up connection, a palmtop or even a mobile phone.
• It saves on the trees: In theory at least, more electronic communication means less paper. Hopefully you don’t print out all your emails, you save them to disk or delete them. And in doing so, you don’t lose out on the audit trail - electronic storage provides a perfectly adequate record and, with proper backups, is a lot safer.

But at what risk?
When we embrace electronic communications, we do so at our peril:

• You may be misunderstood: Email is not a subtle medium and you may not come across quite as you intended. It’s all too easy to send ‘flames’ (inflammatory or critical messages) in the heat of the moment and to have deep regrets the morning after. In a survey of employees in the City of London⁶, 81% of respondents felt that email was used when personal communication would be more effective.
• You lose control of your time: Some employees report becoming slaves to email, with messages arriving at all times of day and night, giving the impression that they are expected to be available 24 hours a day.
• You never know who might read that message: In 1997, a major financial company was forced to pay £450,000 to a rival, after libelling them in emails that had been sent internally. The rival obtained a court order to read the messages after hearing about them. And a recent survey on the abuse of email⁷ turned up one employee who lost her job after forwarding a client’s email to a colleague, with an insult added at the top. After inadvertently hitting the reply button, the employee not only lost her job, the company lost the client.
• Spam, spam and more spam: Unsolicited, unwanted emails are called ‘spam’ and mostly they’re about as likeable as all that junk mail that arrives through your letterbox. At first you may believe all those claims for how you can make money, lose weight and generally enrich your life. You soon catch on. You can have too much spam.

So how does it work?
Email is like conventional mail but without the postman. When you press ‘send’, it’s like shoving the letter in the post box (although, with a dial-up connection, your mail tends to lay in the out tray for a while before being posted in bulk). At the post office (actually your mail server), they look at the address and determine which other post office to forward the message on to. And rather than using a van, the railway or a plane, they use your company’s network or the Internet to get the message there. At its destination, the message waits in the recipient’s mailbox until such time as they stop by and collect it - I told you there was no postman - although that’s usually just a question of clicking on the ‘receive’ button.

So the mechanics are simple. Far too simple. Much harder is making this technology work for us. I’ve trawled round the Internet - so you don’t have to! - to see how others have solved the problem. And here’s what I found, the four steps to email mastery:

1. Know when to use email
2. Be a responsible email user
3. Compose your messages with care
4. Minimise the e-load

Know when to use email

Characteristics of email
Email is distinct from other communications media in that it is:

• Primarily a text medium: Generally speaking, emails are composed of text. Text is a fine medium for expressing very precise meanings; it’s also a medium that you can absorb at your own pace. But text has its limitations - it can’t convey the subtleties of tone of voice or body language, it’s not particularly memorable and it doesn’t grab your attention too well.
• A push rather than a pull medium: A push medium is one that is targeted at specific individuals, like a face-to-face meeting, a phone call or a letter. You can be pretty sure you’ve been heard, even if not understood or acted upon. Push messages are fine in moderation, but overdo it and you don’t know whether you’re coming or you’re going. A pull medium, on the other hand - like a web site, notice board, magazine, TV or radio programme - is aimed at a general audience. It sits and waits for you to come. You are under no pressure to come and, of course, you may never do so.
• Online rather than offline: Being online, i.e. connected to a computer over a network, means that email can reach you extremely quickly where ever in the world you are. Offline media, like paper documents and floppy disks, have to be physically transmitted to the recipient - and that takes time.
• Composed not spontaneous: Emails have to be prepared, they don’t just happen. It takes time to type them and that gives you time to think. With a more spontaneous medium, like the telephone or a face-to-face situation, you have to think on your feet.
• Interactive not passive: Email is interactive in an asynchronous, i.e. time-delayed manner. Over a period of time, you can engage in a discussion or a negotiation that leads to a satisfactory conclusion; you can be sure that a message has been understood or acted upon. A passive medium, like a video, a procedures manual or even a large presentation, can not complete the feedback loop.

Use email when:

• It is important that your audience gets your message: This is a where a push medium is the right solution - a notice on a board or in a magazine, or an article on the intranet would not do the trick.
• You need to deliver a message to more than one person: It is simply more practical and economic to deliver the same message to multiple recipients using email rather than phone calls, memos or one-to-one meetings.
• You want a quick but not an instant response: Email will get to the recipient more quickly than a letter or a video, but you won’t get a response as fast as with a ‘phone call or turning up in person.
• Your audience is at a distance: The fact that email is an online medium means that distance is no object. It will be much cheaper than a long-distance call and faster than the snail mail.
• You want time to compose your message: Use email in preference to a ‘phone call or in-person meeting, if you need to compose your message carefully.
• You require a record of your message: Whether it’s stored on disk or printed out, an email can give you a permanent record of your message, something that’s more difficult to achieve with the ‘phone or working face-to-face.

Don’t use email when:

• It is not essential that all of your audience gets the message: You shouldn’t get emails because someone else needs to read them. If you want to broadcast a message, use the intranet, a notice board, a video or a magazine.
• You need an immediate response: If you’re in a real hurry, use the ‘phone or use the legs for the purpose for which they were intended.
• You are delivering sensitive information: At worst the recipient needs to hear the tone of your voice and that means getting on the ‘phone. Much better is to say it in person, when your body language can do most of the talking.
• Text is not a powerful enough medium: If you need to convey complex processes or principles, to grab attention or influence attitudes, then text is unlikely to be enough. That’s why we have graphics, audio and video.
• You are agitated: Sometimes it’s more tempting to say what you think in writing than on the phone or in person. Don’t. It’s e-rage and it’s not good for your career. If you are agitated, it’s better not to communicate at all. Have a drink. Kick the cat.

Be a responsible email user

As an email user, you have responsibilities to other users and to your organisation:

• Check your mail at least daily: Anyone sending you an email of any importance at all will have a minimum expectation for the time it will take for you to get round to reading it. It is reasonable to expect that you access your mail daily, if not more regularly. Obviously there will be circumstances when you physically can not get to a suitable computer, in which case other arrangements should be made.
• Respond quickly, even if it’s just a holding response: Unless the mail is junk or ‘for information only’, you should aim to respond promptly. It is so simple to make a quick email response, that there really is no excuse for not doing it. If you really can not satisfy the request immediately, you can always send a holding response to let the sender know that you are dealing with it and when they can expect an answer.
• Have your mail dealt with while you’re away: When you will not be available to handle your email, you can make other arrangements. Most email software will allow you to forward mail to another address. Some software will allow you to send automatic holding responses telling the sender that you are away and for how long. If neither of these is possible, you could email those people most likely to mail you and let them know not to expect any response for the time that you are away.
• Delete unwanted messages immediately: Messages sitting in your in-box clog up the mail server, particularly when they come with attachments (if you have a dial-up connection and have downloaded them from your ISP, then you're clogging up your own hard disk). Do your organisation (or yourself) a favour - get rid of them.
• Save messages for reference in an organised way: Those messages that you need to keep - and that's a small minority - should be filed in an orderly manner in folders that sensibly compartmentalise your work. That way you stand some chance of finding them again.

Compose your messages with care

It matters, of course, what you put in your email messages. A well-constructed message will make life easier for your readers and improve your chances of getting the response you want.

The address

• If there’s more than one recipient, address the message to the ones who need to take action: The people that you address your message to should be the ones who really need to take notice of it.
• Copy in those people for whom the message is ‘information only’: Don't expect action from those who've been cc'd.
• Keep copies to a minimum: Think hard before copying in all and sundry. Given that they lead busy lives too, check that the information really is important to them.

The header

• Never leave it blank: The header is what tells the reader what's in the message. If it's blank, there is no way to tell what the message is about or how important it is. It's lazy and impolite to leave the header blank, so don't be surprised if the message is deleted without being read.
• Make it meaningful: The header should clearly describe the content of the message. With a meaningful header, you're more likely to be read. You'll also find it easier to locate messages when they've been archived.
• Try making it the message: You may be able to put your whole message in the header - "Meeting agreed for Monday at 2 your place" - saving the reader the trouble of opening the email.

The body

• Be concise, without being abrupt: Nobody wants to read a lot of text on-screen - it's hard work (25% slower than paper) and tedious. So keep your message as short as you can, without being rude - there's a fine line between being concise and being curt.
• Put the main point up front: You save your reader time if you get to the point straight away. That way, they only need to read on if they need more detail. And if your email really has to be lengthy, you can list the key points at the top of the message and then deal with them one by one under clear headings.
• Keep paragraphs short: It's easier to read text in short paragraphs - a good rule is to limit each paragraph to a single point. And where possible, go a step further and use bulleted lists rather than prose as they are much easier to scan.
• Use plain, simple English: This point is not really unique to email but is worth restating nevertheless. Plain English is easier to read and more likely to be understood. And because email is somewhere between a 'phone call and a letter, you can afford to be relaxed and conversational in tone. This does not mean that spelling and grammar can be ignored. If your messages are going outside your organisation, you need to take as much care as you would with a paper communication.
• Know when to talk in code: Smileys (those strange symbols which express emotions, like :-) for happy and :-( for sad) and e-cronyms (BTW for 'by the way' and GAL for 'get a life') are only for the initiated. Email should not be the province of some secret society, so stick to English even if it takes a little longer.

The signature

• Keep it short: The signature is the automatic sign-off you append to your message. If you need one at all, keep it down to under six lines and spare the bandwidth for more important content.
• Provide contact information: What a signature can do is provide your reader with a number of ways to contact you - your telephone and fax numbers, your address and maybe your web site. That way your reader can choose the most suitable way to get in touch.

Attachments

• Avoid them if you can: Like many things in live, attachments are incredibly useful and also incredibly over-used. They can be too short - in which case they may as well be part of your message - or too long. A very high proportion of disk space on a mail server is taken up by attachments, very many of which are frivolous. When you send an animation or a video to ten people you are actually creating ten new copies of the file. Why not provide the web address or the path on your file server and let your readers access the file there?
• Describe them in the body: When you add an attachment, provide a description of what it contains in the body of your message. That way the reader only needs to open the attachment if they're really interested.

Minimise the e-load

Information overload seems more apparent with email, because the medium somehow feels more urgent and immediate than other forms of communication such as letters. If this overload is getting on top of you, here's some tips for getting back in control.

Use a little discipline
We could all use a little discipline, and I don’t mean from Madam (or Mister) Sin. We can reduce the e-load by being a little more decisive and a little less lazy.

• Restrict your email access times: If you're constantly aware of your incoming messages, you'll become a slave to the medium. Set aside two or three times a day when you can concentrate on reading, responding and composing messages. Don't be interrupted throughout the day by pop-up messages and jingles announcing your new mail - turn those features off.
• Read each message once and only once: This is a bit like handling your traditional mail. It's all too easy to browse through each letter and then put it aside to deal with later - when you have to read it all over again. One of the quickest ways to empty the contents of your in-box is to read each message and deal with it immediately.
• Keep your in-box clear: There's nothing more satisfying than an empty in-box - unless it's a clear desk. Achieving this goal requires you to take action each time you've finished handling your mail - simply archive those messages you're likely to refer to again and then delete the rest, permanently.

Use your right to reply

• Think before you ‘reply to all’: Do you really intend to respond to the sender, not all the other addressees? Remember that one person's valuable information is another's junk mail.
• Cut down on acknowledgements: It's a natural part of communication to acknowledge a response - it's a way of completing the transaction. But not all communications will seem incomplete without them, so you may be able to cut down. You can tell your readers if there's no need to reply. And with some software you can make a check to see if an email has been read, without any action on the part of the reader.
• Follow threads, within reason: You create a 'thread' when you make a reply and send back the original message along with it. This allows the reader to follow the thread of the topic and put your reply a context. However, threads can build up until you are exchanging monstrous messages that go back months. Sometimes it's better to start again and leave the baggage behind.
• Tell senders if you don’t need their mail: If you get mail you don't need, reply to the sender and tell them just that. You can't blame them for sending you unnecessary mail if you don't tell them. And all those mailing lists you joined, just to keep you up-to-date - if you haven't found them helpful, simply unsubscribe and cut down on the junk.

Use your software

• Get to know your software: We don't all have the time to delve into our email software - we just learn the basics and hope for the best. But the latest software is packed with features, many of which can make your life easier. Ask for some training, buy a book or just explore the menus and the on-line help - it doesn't take as long as you think.
• Use filters to reduce the junk: Some software incorporates filters that can be used to keep out junk mail or adult content. One consultant was receiving half a dozen of these a day; by employing the filters he's down to one every two or three days.
• Use mailing lists in moderation: Mailing lists really do save you time and help you to get important information to those who really need it, without having to type in each email address one at a time. But, to minimise the risk of drowning readers in mail from lists, they need to be focused on very specific subjects. Ideally each member of a list will have volunteered for the information and will have the opportunity to unsubscribe. Above all, avoid the worst mailing list of all - the one that mails every employee in the organisation.
• Sort mail into folders: Your email software may allow you to sort your mail into folders and thus avoid a single, lengthy list of messages in your in-box. You could sort messages by sender, by project, by subject or by the action required.

And finally
Don’t have a downer on email. Used for the right reasons and in the right way, it should actually save you time:

• waiting to get through on the ‘phone
• waiting for the snail mail to arrive
• composing and despatching conventional memos

It also reduces the amount of paper on your desk and cuts down on unnecessary interruptions, whether by ‘phone or in person. And remember, when you’ve returned from holiday to a thousand electronic communications, all marked urgent, it could be worse - you could have no emails at all.

Interested in finding out more about this subject? Try http://email.miningco.com

¹Forrester Research Group
²Global Integration
³Global Integration
⁴Investors in People UK and Andersen Consulting
⁵ITU
⁶In Tuition
⁷Content Technologies