Managing the email deluge
Image: Charlie Davidson via Flickr (licence)
Email is the great contemporary communication blessing and curse—ubiquitous, instant … and inescapable. There’s over 300 billion of them flying round the world every single day, some of them useful, most of them spam.
We have filters that cut out a lot of the marketing and phishing spam we would otherwise receive, but what about all of the unnecessary communication we receive (and send) to colleagues and clients every day?
Back in the (pre-1990) day, a letter was the preferred means of written communication. It took time to plan, write/dictate, type, address and post. And it took time waiting for the reply. This focused the mind of the sender in a way that email doesn’t. How often do you find yourself wading through a chain of single word responses to non-questions that could have been resolved with a little more thought—or perhaps just a phone call?
The etiquette of writing a letter has evolved over centuries. Email has been a part of our lives for a mere 20 years. Superficially, an email seems like an electronic version of a letter, but we all know it’s not. But how do we set the rules for email and hope that our correspondents will follow them too? I found an Email Charter that sets out 10 helpful steps to bring order to the chaotic universe of email.
The Charter urges an approach that focuses on brevity, clarity, no open-ended questions, no mass CC-ing, only including essential attachments, and no endless threads detailing previous communication.
But all the tips and suggestions can be boiled down to one simple office-equivalent version of the Golden Rule: Email unto others as you would have them email unto you.
