Useful E-mail Techniques
Being part of a corporate environment, you quickly find out just how easy it is to get inundated by e-mail. Especially when you work in a role directly involved with your company's website. Those sort of people are the ones more likely to use e-mail as their primary form of communication. At least that's the case on my team.
Some of the people in my department (and in all likelihood elsewhere in the organization as well) are so overwhelmed by the quantity of e-mail they receive on any given day that they're literally days behind on reading their e-mail. (so much for Inbox Zero.) These are the people who you begin to assume will never read your e-mail, or will read it well after it's lost any sort of relevance.
My former boss (who recently resigned to spend more time with her family, and whom we wish well) was one of those people. If you sent her an e-mail and walked down the hall to chat with her about it, it was likely already pushed down past the bottom of her screen by the deluge of other messages she'd received in that 15-second timeframe. She was that busy that any message to her had to be as absolutely concise and short as possible - anything over a sentence or two would never be read in its entirety. She simply didn't have the time for it.
To that end, I've worked from day one on crafting my e-mails (regardless of recipient) under the premise that she would have to read it. I'll type up a message as fully as I think it needs to be, containing all the relevant detail. Then I'll cut it to half its length. That's right, half, if humanly possible. If it still looks like she wouldn't read it, it gets cut in half again. I'll try to stick to five sentences or less if I can.
I've also recently started prefacing my subject lines with shorthand designations. (Sidenote about subjects - for the love of all that is holy, please, make sure that your subject lines are descriptive. You have no idea how many e-mails I get every day that have been forwarded for weeks, where the discussion has changed course three dozen times but the subject line hasn't once changed.)
If I'm asking a question where I specifically need an answer, I'll generally preface the subject line with [ ? ]. If I'm sending something I consider particularly urgent, in addition to marking it “important” within Outlook, I'll preface the subject with [ ! ] (yes, I realize this is redundant, but this gets used more when I have to send a message from our web-based content software, which only allows a subject and a message field.)
Then of course there are the more standard methods like using EOM, and the suggestion of using NRN for “No Response Needed.” The catch is that your recipients need to understand at a glance what these acronyms mean — otherwise they're completely invalidated — but once you get past the learning curve it may be worth it. My question is, are there any other useful e-mail tricks you use or have heard of to make communicating more efficient?
I'm genuinely curious what others are using or have found useful.