How to write good emails 2
by Pavel Kartautsau - February 26th, 2010
I’d like to share with you a good practice about how to write emails and do not spend a lot of time for this task.
- The most important is that you need to understand what action you would like to have from the recipient;
- Try to summarize all his potential questions and write shortly one paragraph explanation for every potential question;
- Extract from every paragraph the principal or main idea and put it as a paragraph title. Try to make you titles attractive to the reader (look at the banners on every news web site. On some of them you really want to click to get the info). People start reading from the titles. According to the titles they can “rank” you message for them (whether it is important and interesting for them);
- Put the small picture if it is possible. For some people a small sketch can say more than big sentences (specially if your recipient doesn’t speak good foreign language);
- Try to put in the subject the action you would like to have from the reader;
- Use simple words
Itteco corporate culture requires:
- That every email has to be answered withing 24 hours.
If you can’t resolve the problem written in the email, please something like you are working on that problem now and you’ll try to get the answer tomorrow or next week so that the senders understand that you didn’t ignore him…
Q: What shall you do if you have a lot of email?
A: You need to filter them… What is the criteria?
I always answer to the emails of my manager, email that are addressed directly to me and my team in that order. Only after that the emails where I’m in CC if it is necessary.
Hints:
- if you prepare a report, divide it to two parts: summary and details;
- if you received an email and you think that the sender is stupid and doesn’t understand you at all, your blood pressure if going up and you want to write everything you think about this man right now, don’t do that! Wait 1 hour, think about practice of how to write emails, and then write it;
- if you received an email from your boss where he is pressing you down without any reason (as you think), don’t try to shield you via replying immediately, don’t do that! Wait 1 hour, think about practice of how to write emails, and then write it.
Please also read about how to inspire action with your writing here AIDA: Attention-Interest-Desire-Action
Please comment this post adding your email writing practices.
Good points
Here are my 10 cents on email management.
From my experience dealing with huge amount of emails I can say one thing – don’t sit in your email client for 24/7. Get some rules for yourself – check email 3 times a day, or two – believe me, it will make your day much more productive and will allow you to focus on what’s important. Make sure people know when you are checking emails, so they will be aware of the reply time period. If something urgent comes up – there is always IM or phone, so no need to panic that you are going to miss an urgent email. Email meant to be asynchronous – and it works best this way.
When checking email, I follow the pattern of PIFEM (which is actually based on 4 D’s of email management: do, delete, delegate, defer). It’s specifically designed for Outlook, however, can be implemented in any sufficient email client (http://blogs.msdn.com/ianpal/archive/2008/06/03/email-task-and-time-management-with-pifem.aspx#).
Furthermore, Inbox 0 has been my most valuable achievement in the last two years. You really can feel the tension go away when you have 0 emails in your inbox.
Don’t forget the EOM (you can read more here http://lifehacker.com/5028808/how-eom-makes-your-email-more-efficient)
If you think email will take more than 10 minutes to compose, why not call the people involved or discuss it in person – it will save you much of time and stop threads of further emails. Try to keep emails to one paragraph. Great ideas I’ve used for a while now – http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/mastering-the-short-email.html.
Eric Schmidt said Twitter is poor’s man email when it just showed up.
Very true with regard to technology. But what we should learn is that people actually started using emails in Twitter-like manner (me – no exception). It means:
* actionable subject lines
* short messages
* perhaps, no Hi, Dear, etc.
I am mostly using emails for tracking actions and to-dos which are either small enough to get into a tracking system, or are urgent enough to make ensure that attention is given to it. Not immediate attention though – if immediate action is required, I would use IM or phone follow up.
For this, if you can:
* put the bigger content into wiki or tracking system. If it’s urgent or important not to forget – send me the link with short follow up
* put a clear subject line – so that when I star the email, I know what I wanted to do about it next time I visit it.
* Be careful with Reply action – change the subject line or start a new thread as the subject changes.