13 Bad E-mail Habits – Get Rid to Increase Your Productivity!

After reading an article on TechRepublic, I felt compelled to add on and re-summarize from my point of view. It is a shame that not only this non-structured data that is the backbone of many modern business and government today isn’t harnessed and put to use properly, but it also make many of our lives miserable. I don’t think you should adopt ALL of them, perhaps think of the pros and cons and why.

1. No Subject Line (or a vague one)

Give every e-mail a subject! Make it easy for everyone to understand the context of the message immediately. Most people are only faced with the subjects (occasional mail clients show the first sentence or so) when deciding how to handling e-mail (see tip on handling email).

Empty subject lines these days gets a higher spam rating as well. Another good way to increase productivity is to put extremely short one-off details on the subject line, e.g. “Jiin Joo’s phone number is xxxx-xxxx” instead of “phone number” or “Jiin Joo’s phone number”, which is probably the original question. Other good examples: “John Doe passed away” (vs “John Doe”), “Security Meeting Rm 24 3-4pm” (vs Security Meeting).

Two caveats: One: don’t get too long! Outlook (and many other clients) only show a subset of long subject headers. Ballpark: 10 words max! And two: if the information is sensitive, put it in the body. Many system administration tools (you know, the IT guy taking care of your email) can see the subject of your e-mails flying through his system.

2. Change Topic Without Changing the Subject

On the other hand, there are e-mails that typically end up as a thread, or discussion where there are more than one to and fro going on. Since they belong to the same conversation, they should stick together. However, as e-mail is an asynchronous protocol, the way most clients keep these mail together is based on the title (some sophisticated one might insert tokens into the header or parse the body for quoted text). An example would be the “Conversation” view in your Outlook client, or Gmail’s default conversation view.

When you change the subject, both Outlook and Gmail breaks – a new thread is started. This is good sometimes (see next tip) but seasoned conversation view users will know that most thread breakage happens when someone have an outburst of emotion on the subject line (e.g. appending it with “WTF?”)

Email marketing is notorious in using this trick to do baiting, i.e. show you something that you cared about, but once you read into the detail, it is something else. The opposite effect is also worrying. Imagine someone replying to a “dinner tonight” e-mail the next morning telling you about the Virginia Tech killer going wild on campus and advising you to stay in!

3. Multiple Topics Under One Subject

Forget bandwidth – if you put more than one topic in one email message, some topics might not get the necessary focus it deserves (don’t get me started on IM conversations). It has nothing to do with the ability to discuss multiple things (unless it is really related) in one e-mail. Let your colleague know that you have done the report and is awaiting his or her approval, and put the dinner request on a separate e-mail (or medium such as sms / IM) altogether.

Keep in mind that this is not philanthropy in helping others organize their life. It is when they start to reply to your mail and add more topics into your mail that your own life will go into havoc. Plus, most people classify their email (or label / tag them) – if the two topics are related to two different topics, you can’t classify them properly.

4. Are you sure you want to Reply-To-All?

Make sure you really really need to reply all when you reply all. If your response is intended to the sender only (such as a RSVP to a mass email to a party), use Reply. You will just make a fool out of yourself (and waste everyone’s time) if you just cracked a dirty joke when Replying to All unintentionally.

Also be aware what is the nature of the reply-to address. Sometimes it might be a mailing list such as Mailman or Majordomo, or a “group” such as Yahoo groups or Google groups, or simply your LDAP groups in office.

5. Omitting Context of Reply

Many emails are one-liners (“Yes”, “Sure Thing”, “No need” etc.) If you don’t include the original context of the e-mail, then the reader will be lost. Remember, much like the protocol, users uses e-mail asynchronously, in laymen terms: fire and forget. Unlike IM where you actually sit attentively for your bf/gf to reply to your “Hi…”, you only check e-mail after some period of time.

So even if you want to cut the thread short, make sure the thread contains sufficient context. Not everyone uses Gmail, especially not working people in companies.

6. Shooting the Messenger

This happens usually when quoting someone else. When you receives an e-mail, make sure you know who the original statement is from. A typical scenario will involve someone sending you an e-mail quoting another person seeking an opinion and you respond by attacking the messenger instead of the original message. The messenger here has done you a favour by passing you the message, so be fair to him/her.

7. Misaddressed Recipient

This is an artifact of the predictive filters on your clients such as Outlook. The worst part: they don’t sort them in the order you like them (by Murphy’s law..) so chances are they will be in alphabetical order, or last send etc. For the convenience, there is no real way around is except being more careful. If you don’t benefit, turn off the filtering and do the “search” way (explicitly selecting after searching through your address book).

8. Grouping Strangers

This falls under a bigger problem: not aware of the dynamics of the “To” list. When you send an e-mail to more than one person, you’re making an assumption that people on the To (and CC) line knows each other. This may inadvertently compromise the privacy of the person (maybe he uses a special e-mail address to communicate with you only).

Just so you know, I usually take a huge action on these kind of e-mail especially when it is a forwarded spam or chain e-mail. Sorry if you get dragged into this, but say your friend A sends you and me (assuming you don’t know me) on the same email and I found out that your friend A didn’t bother checking if the email is a fake one, you’ll get a lesson from me about forwarding trojan horses and false information. Plus you automatically get into my concert spamming list, which means you will start receiving e-mails about concerts in Malaysia and Singapore…

So beware – take care of the recipients of your e-mails. If you want to invite 2 group of friends to your party, send two separate e-mails. Otherwise, use the tried and tested BCC (blind carbon copy) which hides the email addresses (and name annotations). One other advantage of BCC is that there won’t be a reply to these people other than the sender (see the Reply-To-All tip).

9. Replying vs. Forwarding

First part of this is about the typical mistake of trying to forward a message to someone but unwittingly replied it to the original sender instead. This relates more to the final point later.

Second part however is more insidious. Depending on your e-mail client, you might have certain settings associated with Forwarding and Replying that are not the same. My pet peeve is on attachment (in the first place we should start putting these attachments in centralized locations, but that’s a topic for another time). When you Reply on say Outlook, by default is doesn’t include the attachment; but if you Forward, the attachment is included. This means that if you’re trying to forward someone an attachment, while using the Reply button, you might have to reattach it manually. Otherwise, the person whom you’re trying to forward to will be looking at your cryptic email wondering “what is this about?”

So what do you do when you’re trying to forward on a document to someone else while thanking the person who sent you the attachment in the first place? This might sound odd, but it’s best to Reply (which includes the original sender), add the user you’re going to forward to as a CC, and thank the sender sincerely, while stating (depending on your style) on the p/s line that you’ll send the other person the attachment on a separate e-mail (or better still, put on a shared folder, especially if that recipient is your company/dept/boss).

10. Inline Replies (ala Forum)

Seasoned forum posters will be familiar with the inline style of replying – after all, people read from top to bottom. To receive a thread half way after the discussion having to look through the history from bottom up is a pain.

But watch-out! E-mails are not forums. When you inline a reply, the user have to “find” the reply. But more typically the reader will think it is a misfire and simply delete it. If you’re responding to a mailing list that has a thread, and you really want to respond to a particular section of the e-mail, it would be courteous to copy that section (presumably with the “>” or whatever indent) to the top, and respond to it. This way, people who are already following the thread can just read your reply, those with no context can do the “start from the bottom” thing.

Although there’s no one rule of thumb, we do see innovations such as gmail’s “Show Quoted Text” that hides all duplicate sections of the e-mail in a thread. This means that even if you inline your response, only your response will show while the rest of the thread is hidden, thus making your reply look stupid.

11. E-mail Gestures

If you’re the kind who write long e-mails, do realize that people can’t read straight. People just prefer that you tell them what to do. Some tips here include the A-B-A rule (ala musical A-B-A format), i.e. start by telling them what to do (or what to expect), then go into the body of your email explaining why so (or how to do it), and end of by repeating your call for action, which is what you expect them to do (or what to expect). See this blog entry for a good example 🙂

But hopefully you will learn to write shorter e-mails as clients these days are getting smaller as well – think PDA, Blackberry, etc. Getting straight to the point, turn your usual style of writing around by going to the conclusion first, then delving back into what would have been your intro.

12. E-mail vs Instant Messenging

The landscape of IM has matured for a number of years, especially when enterprises are now in full realization of the productivity gain of being able to have an intermediary between e-mail (which tends to clog up and have a huge back log) and telephone (which demands immediate attention and doesn’t help in increasing productivity of the average worker at all).

SMS, IM (e.g. MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, GTalk, QQ, and the myriad other networks), Twitter, etc. are set to converge in some sense into this space where we can all be happy to take message and answer them at an “almost immediate” manner (as the message is short enough to be consumed). It can be real time (and a real bandwidth saver…) when necessary, or it can behave just like e-mail (when is the last time you clean up your phone’s SMS history?)

13. Sending before Thinking

This is probably the worst mistake to make that will lead to more than just lower productivity, but sour relationships and sometimes war. I saved this for the last because if you don’t remember anything else here, try doing this: count to 3 before clicking send. Unlearn the Alt-S or whatever shortcut key you use to send e-mails and try proofreading as a habit. Take care of misrepresentation and clarify all gray areas.

If a carrot isn’t enough, think of the stick, where you can be sued by the other person or by your employer for not thinking before sending. E-mails are pretty much as good as documents these days with your signature (I even sign all my company e-mails as a practice). On the emotional side of things, a harsh e-mail replied when emotions run high might just exacerbate the situation or the relationship.

Just like this blog entry (yet another new way to write an e-mail to many people I guess…) I’ve re-read this 3 times by the time I post it (and reserve the right to edit it further!) This kind of meticulous effort in using e-mail will bring you a long long way.

Have you found a bad habit to correct? Try correcting them one by one. If you have more bad habits, please feel free to contribute. Bottom line: granted that there’s no better protocol for electronic communication that’s more prevalent currently, let’s make the most out of all our lives by being considerate and intelligent in using this tool: Electronic Mail.