CEO’s Brief Guide to Email Effectiveness
on Saturday, April 9, 2011Email has become the scourge of the C-Suite. Executives may be wasting 1 to 2 hours a day due to bad email habits. Here are three habits for more effective email:
Eliminate Tasks and Emails
Every month or so, unsubscribe to newsletters that don’t add value.
Analyze emails for tasks you can shed or delegate. Time management expert Brenda Buratti says, don’t ask “can I respond to this email in 2 minutes or less?” — instead, first ask “is this a vital task?” If the email is not part of a vital task, delegate or delete it.
Write Better Emails
Write better emails so you get faster responses and need to spend less time clarifying.
1. Write a Subject Line that says clearly what the other person needs to do
2. Get to the point within the first sentence or two
3. Notice where you have systematic mis-communication that requires multiple emails to clarify, and find ways to make it clear the first time
Stop Re-Processing
Most people, according to “Email Sanity” expert Randy Dean, read each email message 2 to 7 times before deciding what to do with it. That represents wasted time or “rework” — bringing more discipline to your email, by deciding at the first reading what to do about the email (even if you don’t immediately do that thing), can save you buckets of time.
[Read the longer article Email Sanity with Randy Dean.]
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