Last week I had a major revelation at lunch with Maia Beatty. Â We say all the time to “write like you talk” but we never deal with the other side. Which is Read Like You Listen. Â Think about that for a moment. That is seriously powerful stuff! Â Instead of reading an email in your own “voice” if you will, you need to read it in theirs. Â Still not sure what I mean? Â Let’s use an example. A friend of mine sent an email to someone and said something sarcastic. It is difficult to be sarcastic in email but in her head, it was hilarious. Â When it was received, the person took it at face value – in their head they weren’t being sarcastic. And the ensuing conversation was all kinds of trouble for no reason. Â In fact, when I was shown the email I immediately […] Continue reading
Creating Real Email Rules
Seth Godin put out a blog post today about making an email checklist . Â He referenced an article by Chris Anderson trying to accomplish the same. And of course there’s my rant in February on encouraging people to think before they hit “reply all”. Â Why are we all writing about this? Because we get too much email right now. Â The average person takes 30-60 seconds reading any given email. If you receive just 60 emails, you’ve spent an hour on that just cognitively processing them. Â If you have to open and read, that time goes up. Â How much time do you suppose you spend reading email? So these gentlemen have tried to come up with a list of rules for email to help streamline the process. For instance, they both recommend using “EOM” (end of message) at the end of subject lines if that’s all […] Continue reading