Sunday, May 21, 2006

How to get your emails read

As I brace for the Monday morning email onslaught, I can only hope that the people writing to me have read this excellent writer's guide from Blue Flavor.

A couple excerpts:

"For god's sake, have a subject line." -- Amen. Emails with meaningless subject lines like "Hey!" and "Help!" so deserve a quick click of the Delete button. Heaps of thanks to the folks who respect my time (and intelligence) with informative subject lines such as:
  • Need help staffing Thursday's meeting
  • Just checking in after the conference
  • Found partial funding (was Re: re: re: will summer program be cancelled?)
  • Lunch Wednesday at 1?
  • Fun: Three ways to get your cat to do the dishes
  • FY review: First two chapter drafts
"Make your requests clear. You should set them apart from the rest of the message by paring them down to one sentence, with white space before and after." -- Again, amen. In fact, consider making them the subject line itself.

No comments:

Post a Comment