Courtesy of The Hamster Revolution Web site, here are some tips for managing your e-mail. We all seem to be drowning in e-mail these days, constantly battling spam and hoping that the important message manage to survive our filters. These tips will help you spend less time and still accomplish your purposes with e-mail.
- Send less. Don’t abuse the “Reply to All” and “CC” features or group distribution lists. Target your e-mails – don’t spray them.
- Quit boomeranging. Eliminate just one out of five outgoing e-mails, and you’ll shrink your incoming volume at least 10 percent.
- Think before you send. Ask yourself whether your e-mail is helpful – timely, topical and targeted.
- Be polite but with conditions. Not every e-mail requires a reply. Make an agreement with your key contacts to reserve thank-you e-mails for extraordinary efforts.
- Adopt shorthand acronyms such as NRN (No reply needed) or NTN (No thanks needed).
- Instead of sending a message that launches a series of back-and-forth e-mails, use it to schedule a live conversation.
- Strengthen your subject lines. Weak ones confuse recipients and make it hard to locate e-mails later.
- No more wall of words! People don’t read e-mails – they scan them. Start every message with a one-line greeting of no more than eight words.
- Use the “ABC” method to split the body of the e-mail into three distinct sections:
- Action: summarizing your purpose.
- Background: presenting your key points.
- Close: clarifying the next steps.
- Coach – or suffer. Offer frequent senders a few good tips – or suffer through their really bad e-mails.
- Store purposefully. Ask yourself: What are the odds I’ll need this information later?
- File smart. Create a limited number of mutually exclusive folders based on content – not sender, software or some other criteria. Use subfolders. Label everything carefully.
