Rock your email box!

Rock your email box! Google shows us how.

An article about email in 2014? Really?

You’re probably thinking email has been around since the dawn of mankind. Well, at least the early 90s.

Most people know how to send an email on services like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Hotmail (which became Outlook.com, recently).  However, many people could still benefit from some helpful advice on using email. Can email help you improve your day-to-day job performance, relationships with colleagues, or boost your professional image?  Yes, it can!

In fact, Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google talks about email in his new book, How Google Works, which he co-authored with Jonathan Rosenberg (the former Senior Vice President of Products). How Google Works discusses many things, including how email should be used in professional circles. Google’s rise from a “late-stage startup” to its current position as a “mega-corporation” is due to the company’s innovative and smart approaches in handling strategy, technology, and communications.

It’s safe to say that Schmidt and Rosenberg know a lot about email. In 2012, Google announced that it had the largest email service in the world with 425 million people using Gmail for business or for pleasure.

So, without further ado, let’s have a discussion on email, thanks to Schmidt and Rosenberg, who contributed the core ideas in this article.

1. Respond quickly.

If you can’t respond immediately to an email with a detailed response, then simply respond with a “Thanks, I’ll get back to you shortly.” Or, at least respond to emails according to the “sunset clause” which says to answer emails by sunset each day (cute, eh?)

Why is speed so important? Think of it this way: the amount of time that passes between the time you received the email and the time you reply to the email correlates to how important this person is to you. Do you really want your client to feel that they are not important?

Expediency = professional love.

2. Useless prose has got to go.

To give an analogy about reducing wordiness in emails, Schmidt said this: “Think about the late novelist Elmore Leonard’s response to a question about his success as a writer: ‘I leave out the parts that people skip.’ Most emails are full of stuff that people can skip.” So don’t be that person. Don’t write a novel. Be precise and get out!

Ever heard of http://three.sentenc.es/ ? This website is startlingly simple – and its look and feel makes the point that all emails, no matter what, are formed in three sentences. No more. No less. Think Twitter. You have to be super concise and get right to the point.

3.  Categorize email and purge constantly.

Each time you open your email, you need to decide how to categorize it. It’s a good practice to create folders inside your inbox that will allow you to store and categorize these notes. Folders can be titled, “Take Action Now,” “Due by Tuesday” or “My Favorite Client.” In this way, when you are purging your old emails, you won’t accidentally delete important ones. Labeling and storing important emails can help de-clutter the inbox, too.

4. Handle email in last-in-first-out order.

This tip goes against our culture. When we go to, say, a restaurant and give our name to the hostess, we must wait for a table according to “first come, first serve.” This phenomenon is known as “queuing” and we do this for everything, from standing in line to buy goods at the store, to waiting our turn to see the doctor. But Schmidt says that by reading the latest email, we are learning the current, most up-to-date information. Besides, Schmidt says that “the older stuff” may be resolved by others.

5. Think of others.

When you receive an email with “useful information,” consider who else may find it useful, too. After all, everyone is a “router” and by sharing information and not squirreling it away, makes us appear considerate and others feel that they are important, too.

In addition, always try to consider your audience. Your message is not for you, it’s for an audience.  How would you like your message to be received by this audience? Of course, diction, syntax, and grammar matter. But meaning is also construed by inference, tone, fairness, accuracy, and objectivity.

6. Use “bcc” (blind carbon copy) sparingly!

To blind copy recipients mean that, by default, you are up to something and are acting sneaky. Why blind carbon copy recipients if you can just as easily include them as a “carbon copy?” Either people are relevant to an email or they are not. Pick one.  As Google says, “Don’t be evil.”

7. No bellowing, screeching, or yelling.

The Google authors acknowledge that it is easy to be impatient or sarcastic on email. Here’s an analogy: road rage. When a driver feels that they have been wronged on the road, they can turn into a Tasmanian devil. Take them out of their car and onto your couch, and their attitude changes. Same scenario with email. Don’t make email a vehicle of rage.  It’s better to get up, and go see this person and have a face to face conversation if you can’t maintain your cool in an email.

Another way of thinking about this: don’t write an email that you wouldn’t want posted in the cafeteria.

8. Follow up on requests.

Most emails usually have some kind of request at hand. So, when sending an email to someone with an action you want them to take, “copy yourself, then label the note “follow up.”   Also, there are email reminders and follow-up services available that integrate with your email providers. Boomerang, Followup.cc, and Right Inbox give added functionality to your current email by letting you track your emails by scheduling customized times and reminding you of certain ones with calendar pop-ups.

9. Help yourself in your next search activity.

The Google authors have good ideas for trying to help your “future self” when you are searching for a particular email. Sometimes that all important information comes from a mobile phone, a Light version for Outlook, or just from an individual who gives no background information. You can help yourself by forwarding the email to yourself and adding the additional information or keywords that will help you in the future find this. So, even if the recipient does not adequately give the keywords or specs on the information, you can include it and send it to yourself for future email-grief insurance.  

Experts like Schmidt and Rosenberg agree: your reputation can be positively or negatively affected by how you use email. So, let’s rock our email box!

If you would like to read an excerpt of Schmidt’s and Rosenberg’s book on email, visit http://time.com/3425368/google-email-rules/

Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg “9 Rules for Emailing from Google Exec Eric Schmidt,” www.time.com, Sept. 24, 2014, accessed Oct. 15, 2014. Web. <http://time.com/3425368/google-email-rules/>.