Tuesday Time-Wasting Tip-Off #2: Why Short Emails Give Everything You Say A Big Impact

Welcome to this week’s Tuesday Time-Wasting Tip-Off, the second instalment in an ongoing series. This week I am continuing the email theme.

Why Short Emails Give Everything You Say A Big Impact

In business and personal life, email is a great tool. But, like all tools, it needs to be properly handled and you need to learn how to wield it effectively to get the most from it. We often spend an excessive amount of time checking email, and then even more time organizing messages, responding to them, filing them away, backing them up, etc.

As I mentioned in last week’s tip, some days I live in my email inbox just staying on top of the demands from clients. However, I check my email only twice a day, and when I do check, I rarely spend more than 20 minutes at a stretch dealing with it.

If an email requires more than a minute or two of my time, I should really be talking to the person face-to-face.

Many of us use email as a way to avoid directly interacting with people, it is often easier to discuss a painful subject that is causing us anxiety via email, thus avoiding confrontation, than it is to deal directly with the problem. It is understandable, and I am as guilty of doing that as the next person, but that is a subject for another article.

Regular communication emails regarding my business requiring more than a few lines or a few minutes to write can easily be avoided by just reaching for the phone.

I rarely write a lengthy email, anything over a few lines should be a formal memo composed and edited in a proper word processor and sent as an attachment to an email. We mostly regard emails as frivolous and easily overlook them, but an actual document carries a potent message. The formal memo gives the message more weight and conveys a gravity and seriousness that a simple email message cannot.