Podcast episode 053: 6 tips for email in the new decade

In today’s episode, we talk with Alec Satin of the Alec Satin on People, Projects, and Process blog, about how we can make our email more efficient, and even the future of email.

Alec is a project manager and organizational expert with a passion for fixing workplaces. As a trained therapist, entrepreneur and Information Technology professional, he seeks to infuse environments with order, process and sanity.

During this past decade there were several advances in how we get our email…  Email became easier than ever with Gmail and email became truly mobile with devices such as the Blackberry and iPhone.  And perhaps even several benevolent princes were able to find you through email so you could help them by keeping their fortunes as they were deposed.

During this past decade, books like Getting Things Done by David Allen and email applications like Microsoft Outlook have tried to help us organize our email inboxes better.  But, today many of us are overloaded with work and we spend too much time reading, replying, and composing email.  But, what does 2010 and this coming decade look like and what can we do to organize our email better?

Well, here are a few tips from Alec Satin on ways we can better use email starting today for the new decade.

1.)   Keep Your Inbox Empty

The purpose of your email inbox should not be as an email repository or task list.  It should be treated like a physical inbox on your desk.  Your email inbox should be where you open email and determine whether it should be acted upon immediately, in cases where it would literally take less than 30 seconds to address, or whether it should be filed or tagged to be addressed at a later time outside of your inbox.

2.)  Keep Your Subject Clear

Cover only one topic per email and keep your subject clear!  If you do need to cover 5 topics, then send out 5 different emails!  Alec suggests following the advice at Lifehacker.com and create “Twitter-style” emails where possible by using your subject line as the body of your email.  Use meta information at the beginning of the subject line, such as “ACTION:” “INFO:” “REMINDER:” “QUESTION:” and type a short message following the meta header followed by <EOM> for “end of message” at the end.  The body of the message can then be left blank.  So your entire subject line would look something like this:

ACTION: Be sure to follow up with me on your action items from last week <EOM>

That way the recipient can quickly read your email without even needing to click and open it and it is much easier to find the email later.

3.)  Don’t CC: The World.

Only send emails to people that absolutely need them.  By adding your boss to every one of your emails, you give the impression that you need their approval on those issues that they are expecting you to handle.  Also, by adding the bosses of others to the cc list, you come across as passive-aggressive to your recipients.  Basically you give the impression that you don’t trust your teammates to get their work completed.  In either case, it comes across as a “CYA” maneuver.  Don’t do it – it just makes you come across as a jerk and clutters people’s inboxes.

Last episode we covered the RACI model.  You should only CC: those folks that need to be Consulted or Informed on the particular topic.

4.)  Just Say No to Rambling Emails

Email should be no longer than 2 screens – you should only need to page down once at the most to read someone’s email.  If you are the recipient of a rambling email, rather than try to read through it, just respond with “What are you asking?”  Hopefully they will be able to succinctly summarize their email. If you were thinking about writing a rambling email – don’t do it!  As the guys over at manager-tools.com advocate, your first sentence in the email should state the “bottom-line” of the message, so you aren’t digging through the email to try to find it.

5.)  Use Gmail If You Can!

You can access Gmail anywhere and searching and response is so much faster than with using Outlook.  Your data is safe, and you can remotely read and back up your Gmail email via POP or IMAP to a desktop client such as Outlook (see http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=77689).

6.)  If you do have to use Outlook, use the Advance Find search feature

If you are trying to find a specific email in outlook, use “Advance Find” to speed the search process up.  Set a date range to search for.  Use key words.  Search by people in the To: field.  Also, when using Outlook you should save important emails as a file to your hard drive.  Then you can search through saved emails fast by using a program such as Locate32.

So what does the future look like for email?  We think that email will become more efficient and will pick up some social networking capabilities such as that found in Google Wave and other Project Management 2.0 applications like Microsoft SharePoint.

I want to thank Alec for being on the show today.  You can contact Alec directly at alec@alecsatin.com and be sure to check out his excellent blog “Alec Satin on People, Projects, and Process” at www.alecsatin.com.  Alec provides a lot of great topics and even downloads at his site, so check it out.

Tags: alec satin, decade, email, tips