Projects Possible

I get my fair share of email every day… currently in the 150 - 200 range and that is after they’ve gone through our corporate mail filters so that number does not include spam.   I use Xobni and ClearContext IMS as plugins on my Outlook in order to increase productivity and still I find that I have a difficult time getting my email Inbox to empty every day.  Certainly not for lack of trying but I am just inundated with what I would call poorly thought out, and carelessly constructed email messages.

In just today’s email I ran across the following types of email:

1. 1.  The email storm as I like to call it.  Someone has requested a piece of information from members of the team and rather than the members of the team just sending the information to the one that requested it they hit the REPLY ALL and send their piece of information to everyone that was on the original distribution whether they needed it or not.
2. The attach attack which occurs when again there is a large distribution of individuals and the sender attaches file after file after file to the email.  I had one today that had 9 MB of attachments that were sent to 12 different people and in reality only 3 of those people needed the attachments in the first place.   Wanna know where you disk space is going?  Look at all of those unnecessary attachments.
3. The Carbon copy the world email. This is one of my favorites.  It might also be called the CYA or Cover Your Ass email, or the hidden agenda email.  You find it most commonly in situations where there are issues or problems or things aren’t going the way the sender wants them to go so they try to get the buy-in or approval from anyone and everyone that they can think of.   The one I had today was addressed to me and had 11 carbon copies… and by the way it ultimately created an email storm.  Totally unnecessary and usually it doesn’t produce the results the sender had hoped for.
4. The Indecisively addressed email. It should be a general rule everywhere that if a message is addressed TO someone that this is the person expected to reply.  If you are a CC (Carbon Copy) the message is for your information only and if you feel you need to reply you should reply to the people in the TO and the person that sent it to you… (Don’t create an email storm)  Don’t send me an email with me as the CC and expect me to have any action items or tasks to do in that email.  When I’m the CC it gets much less attention.  Figure out who you are addressing and make the message TO them.
5. The storyteller… Email should NOT be your foray into novel writing.   Get to the point and make it early!  Don’t make me wade through paragraphs of history or dissertation to get to the final paragraph of what it is that you want.   Chances are if it is more than a couple hundred words it isn’t getting read!
6. The conversation stealer is another favorite of mine.  In this email you will have a subject line that is relevant to the message and a reply comes back but there is now an added subject or content in the body that is not related to the original thread at all.  It’s almost as if they feel as if they have your attention so now they need to unload all of the other things.   My typical response to these pieces of email are “Thanks for the reply and the information I needed about XYZ.  Regarding the others… please address them in a different email thread.”
7. The marketing mess.  In my email environment about 80% of my email is exchanged with INTERNAL employees.  The other 20% is with external contacts.  Marketing in their infinite wisdom seems to feel as if we need to let EVERYONE including all of our internal employees, who already know,  about the latest and greatest widget or upcoming conference.  Let’s all put tag lines and hyperlinks and images into our email signatures.  Talk about a waste of bandwidth.   Xobni or ClearContext if you are reading this maybe you can develop a way for us to remove things like “q1marketingimagesig.gif” from our mailstores.
8. The pick up the phone and call email.  These are the ones where you can see they are getting volleyed back and forth back and forth and the medium just isn’t helping the matter.  Pick up the phone or walk across the hall and discuss it.   If you’ve had to clarify yourself in email more than a couple of times you better do something different… the email method is NOT working.

And those were just in today’s email.  The sad thing is I am seeing the same ones day after day after day.  Perhaps we need to be licensed to use email and the Internet.  You pass a course and a test and you are a certified email and Internet user.  You can put letters after your name and everything.   Come on people let’s start thinking before we press the send button!!!

This post was read 10 times until now