email can be a pretty phenomenal communication tool all by itself. But, like any form of communication, you really begin to realise the true power of the tool if you combine it with all of your other methods of communication. Just as music is great just to hear, it’s ten times more powerful to see it and feel it performed as well as to hear it.

If you need to speak to someone about an important matter, consider sending a short email earlier in the day. This way the email is going to prompt the person about your upcoming call as well as provide them some type of outline as to the purpose of your call.

For example:

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Good morning Bob.

I trust your day is going well. I wanted to send a short email to ask if we could catch up on the telephone around 3pm this afternoon?

I need to discuss the Jones project and want to get your feedback on two items:

1. Pricing
2. Delivery time

Could you get back to me by email before 12 o’clock to confirm that 3pm will be okay for a telephone catch up.

Kind regards…

PAUL

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While I could phone Bob totally out of the blue at three o’clock, I think you will agree that it is far more professional to give him some notice in the event that he will not be available at 3pm.

How do some recent international survey results regarding e-mail use compared to your office?

If you think about it, Microsoft Outlook (or whatever e-mail management program you are using) is most probably the only piece of software that is open on everybody’s computer constantly throughout the day.
There is no question that e-mail is now an integral part of most people’s work practices.

Of course this is both a benefit as well as a problem. While e-mail has liberated us in so many ways, the very fact that Outlook is open all the time and beckons us to read each and every e-mail instantly when it arrives into our inbox means that a significant amount of our valuable time is taken up with reading and responding to e-mail.

In recent survey conducted by a leading e-mail management organisation, Mike Song from a company called Cohesive Knowledge concluded that e-mail is a much bigger problem when it comes to managing time
than most people thought. Here are some of the results from his survey.

* Professionals reported spending 2 hours per day
processing email with 30 minutes of this time occurring
after normal business hours.

* Professionals indicated that 25% of email processing
time is wasted. This equates to 15 wasted days per
year per employee. For an enterprise with 10,000
employees, this equates to an annual loss of $152
million in wages.

* Professionals now receive an average of 41 emails per
day.

* 88% agreed that they often receive unnecessary email.

* 75% indicated that their co-workers often over-use the
reply-to-all feature yet remarkably only 14% claimed
that they, themselves, over-use this feature.

* 55% reported that the quality of email at their
enterprise is ‘poor to fair’.

* 54% often receive warnings that their inbox is over-the-
limit.

* Although professionals now send and receive an average
of 19,200 emails per year, only 12% of those surveyed
had ever experienced email productivity training.

Although this information was based mostly around North American data, I’m quite sure but the results will be similar in Australia, New Zealand and some parts of Asia.

What do you think of these survey results? Do you agree or disagree? Do you find that e-mail is consuming a significant part of the time? Do you find that there is never enough time in your day because e-mail interruption constantly?

If you have answered yes to any of my questions, then I may have a solution. As we will discuss in the coming articles, Zero Inbox is a training program and system designed to help managers and employees in organisations across Australia and New Zealand reduce the inbox to zero and finally getting control of the e-mail and the e-mail processes.

While we can’t always stop professional and business e-mail arriving in our inbox, there are many things that we can do as users of e-mail, to reduce the feeling of overwhelm around our inbox and e-mail processes.

An email signature sits just above the footer of  your email and lists your name, title, company name, phone number, email address, and other useful information.

A signature not only makes your Emails look professional, it saves time by not having to type this information into every Email.

Even if you have a default signature, you can change it to another signature when you are writing an Email. For example, you might want one signature for your business email and another for your personal Email. You can ever add company logos of photographs for a more elaborate signature.

To use one of your other signatures when writing an Email, simply click on ‘insert’ while in the compose email mode in Outlook. Scroll down on the drop down box to ‘signature’ and all of the signatures you have already set up will be shown to you. Pick the one you want and click it and it will appear anywhere in the email you want it to show up.

If you are not sure how to create signatures, ask a colleague, contact your help desk, or try Googling it.

email usually follows general business writing principles. When writing an email to a colleague or client, it’s important to establish your reason for writing the email in the first sentence or two. Then, after adding any facts or context, tell your reader clearly what you would like them to do next.

In this way the person who receives your email can quickly establish its importance and value when they see it in their email preview pane during a quick email scan through their Inbox.

Like business letters, your email sentence structures should be concise, logical and built upon one another.

Sarcasm and passive-aggressive conversations don’t work at all well in Email.

If you have ever misinterpreted the tone in someone’s email you already know the dangers of not being clear and concise with your email messages.

The date and time stamp are taken from your computer clock so it is important to ensure your computer clock is up to date.

Having the correct time and date on your computer helps those who you are Emailing know how long ago you sent the email and if they should give your message priority. You can update your computer clock using the control panel.

Your ability to type quickly and accurately is your ticket to a more productive day.

If you still ‘hunt and peck’, take some basic lessons in typing or try using some inexpensive ‘learn to type’ software.

Most email software gives you the option to send email in plain text or HTML. HTML email allows you to add graphics such as graphic headers and footer. The problem is that HTML Emails and can often get caught by email filters.

Consider using plain text. It means that your Emails have a greater chance of getting through to the people you are sending your messages to.

Just because you are writing an email and not a formal letter doesn’t mean you can drop the need for writing properly. Whether you are writing an email or a formal report, good grammar and spelling are essential.

Glaring mistakes in your style or ability to use the English language throws a dim light on your competency as a professional person. So if you are writing to a customer with a major proposal and fail to use proper grammar, your proposal not only looks sloppy but also appears not very well thought.

If you feel that you do not have good writing skills, or you have poor English skills, for goodness sake take a writing course. If you don’t know when to use a semi-colon compared to using a colon, then it’s time for some revision.

One final Thought

While it might be alright to abbreviate your SMS messages, it’s not when you are using Email.

The whole idea of email is to stay in touch
faster than ‘snail mail’ , so check your business
and personal email addresses regularly.