Email Management

One of the sites linking to CommLog is The Nub out of the UK, which recently posted a brief email management strategy that I found useful. In reading it I recalled our own advice to clients regarding email, which is best summed up in 16 words:

“If an email takes more than two minutes to write, it’s an email you shouldn’t write.”

The fact is, an email that takes more than just a few minutes to write probably involves content better expressed through different media (read: media richness), and as such, you’ll likely be better served making a call, or even better, walking down the hall for a 30 second conversation with the intended recipient. (Exception: emails you must write to document an agreement or conversation; in these cases still have the conversation via phone or face-to-face, but write the email as a confirmation after the fact.) There’s more guidance for email management that this, of course—and here are three items worth reading: * Staples has an article titled Managing Email here, and the author, Jan Jasper, has additional tips here at Business Know-How. * Asset Now has a straight-forward list of email dos and don’ts here. * Online user experience guru Mark Hurst has a free whitepaper titled Managing Incoming Email: What Every User Needs to Know here.