I’m a Gen-Xer. Which means I’ve only been using email for a little more than half my life. I sent my first email in the fall of 1991 as a college freshman by typing ‘elm’ into a terminal at the university library.
Here are a few lessons I’ve learned from my many years of experience.
- Email is best for conveying information, not having a conversation. It is best to think of it as one-way and not requiring a response. Since people often try to have conversations via email anyway, I try and keep each email message to one central point.
- If I have two points to make, I send two separate emails. Email threads tend to take on a life of their own. If one point gets heavy responses, the other point is likely to get lost. This way, I can follow up on the second point without the distraction of the first confusing people.
- I use email to document decisions and approvals and other things that were discussed offline. It is a great way to refer back when questions arise.
- The more email I send the more I receive. I call it email velocity. I resist the urge to reply quickly to a quick response in a deliberate attempt to slow things down. Especially when multiple people are jumping in on a message thread.
- I know the emojis aren’t considered professional, but email doesn’t do a good job of conveying tone. I like to use smiley faces, winky faces, and thumbs up. Nothing too casual. If I think the audience may not appreciate the emoji, I’ll be a little more liberal with exclamation points instead.
- I generally dislike “thank you” emails. It just adds to my email clutter. I would prefer not to receive them and don’t like to send them. Unfortunately, a lot of people expect them, so if I don’t know the other person well (or know that they really like the “thank yous”) I will use them.
- Sending an email at the end of the day, especially right before the weekend is a great way to make yourself feel better. You can go home with a clear head. Unfortunately, the poor soul who got your 4:58 PM Friday message now feels the way you did right before you sent that email. They will resent you for sending it and will likely send a 4:59 reply to get it off their plate and back onto yours. Resist the urge to ping-pong this one until one of you gives up. Be the bigger person and don’t send the late-in-the-day email.
- I use a modified inbox zero approach. I can’t deal with 1,000s of unread emails in my inbox. I read every email and act on it. I don’t delete anything except junk. If it’s junk, I delete it right away (or unsubscribe first if it isn’t too spammy). If I want to keep it, I file it. If I can’t act on it right away, I leave it in my inbox as ‘unread” so I know to get back to it right away. There are few important emails in my inbox where I’m waiting for a response that I leave as ‘read’ so I can find them right away but know I don’t need to act on them. Right now, my work email has 9 messages in the inbox and 7 are unread. Everything else is filed or deleted.
- I file compulsively, and rarely delete (except the junk and spam). I use broad folder categories and rely on search to find messages. I will reuse last year’s budget folder this year. I can search by date within the folder just as easily as searching in a folder specific to last year.
