By Lauren Rikleen
In just a few years, email has evolved from a convenient way to communicate into a demanding, incessant tool that has blurred any remaining boundaries between the workday and personal time. The problem of email overload has become so intrusive that The Washington Post recently wrote about the growing trend of declaring “email bankruptcy” in order to assert freedom from responding to old emails.
But for the majority of us who cannot opt out of the email world, there is a need to develop some reasoned expectations about the effective and controlled use of email and to create a semblance of order in the unregulated universe where email resides. The following are six ways to help you gain control of your email:
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Too frequently, emails are used to escape tasks by leaving the follow-up burden to others. |
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1. Stop the proliferation of illiteracy. Everyone is busy, but there is a reason why grammar and punctuation were invented: They make words easier to read and create order out of written communications. Stop wasting other people’s time by making them discern where one sentence ends and another begins. What worked for e. e. cummings’s does not translate into today’s electronic communications.
2. Delete the endless stream of “Re: Fw: Fw:” that precede the text when you forward an email. It is a waste of the recipient’s time to endlessly scroll down in search of an actual message. And the message is generally lost on BlackBerry users who give up rather than wait for the screen to continually be prompted to search “More.”
3. Don’t “Reply All” unless you absolutely, positively must—and even then, check to be sure it’s necessary. Very rarely do others need to see your reply to a sender’s inquiry, especially when so many group emails are simply announcements, scheduling inquiries or a notice of some sort. Other people do not care that you have said thank you in response to the sender. Really.
4. Don’t use email to lessen your own burden by placing it on someone else. Too frequently, emails are used to escape tasks by leaving the follow-up burden to others. A prime example is the email that asks someone else to call you. In the old days—that is, two or three years ago—if you wanted to talk to someone on the phone, you would call them. Replacing telephone tag with email tag is inefficient and annoying.
5. Simplify efforts to schedule calls and meetings among multiple parties. The only thing more inefficient than scheduling meetings and conference calls via telephone, is to use email alone. A sender’s email listing preferred dates is generally followed by a steady stream of “Reply All” responses, which invariably are not responsive to each other. Moreover, the burden is then placed on the recipient to continually click back and forth between dates proposed in the email and his calendar to check for availability. Recipients then often suggest new dates, with no offer to coordinate the numerous options. Even worse, however, is the request for a meeting that begins: “Please send me some available dates.”
6. Stop incorporating email into your family life. You are not doing your children any favor if you cannot look up from your handheld device to watch their sporting events. They know your head is not lowered because you are praying, and they also see how unengaged you are in their activities while sitting in the stands. Being present requires your physical and mental presence.
Used with permission. All rights reserved.
Lauren Stiller Rikleen is an attorney and mediator, and a senior partner with Bowditch & Dewey LLP. She is the executive director of the Bowditch Institute for Women’s Success and the author of Ending the Gauntlet: Removing Barriers to Women’s Success in the Law. For more information, visit www.bowditch.com/success.
July 2007
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