I was listening to my Darren Hardy daily inspirational nessage today and it struck a cord with me so I decided to post a message to my site so more people can improve their email persona.
There is too much relience on emails these days when there are probably better ways to get a response from people without intruding on their time too much. I have taken some action points of my own from his comments and hope that you, too, can get some time saving inspiration from them.
SEND LESS EMAILS
I know this is easy to say, but is difficult to achieve so maybe follow these three simple steps by batching your questions, updates and FYI’s etc into one list and
- Bring them to your next meeting and discuss face to face
- Phone the person rather than send an email as it has been shown that you can answer 10 questions in a few minutes without keyboard clattering and a constant back and forth on a computer
- Aggregate your questions into just one email rather than ten as that is less to consider, but make sure you have done your own diligence and research on the questions in case they may already have been answered in that person’s FAQ previously
SEND LESS FREQUENTLY
Rather than send emails at any time of the day, save your outbound email responses to two specific times a day. This will help you manage your time better, but help your recipients more by
- Enabling them to answer all of your emails at the one sitting rather than at various random times throughout the day
- Batching outbound emails breaks any expectation of a fast response. It is shown that the faster you respond, the more emails you will get!
By letting people know that you only respond twice a day will train people around you to change their habits as well and they will not expect an immediate response. This will free up your time to be able to action your more important tasks towards your grand goals
STRESS YOUR RECIPIENT LESS
No matter when you send an email, a recipient always thinks you need a reply sooner than you probably do. Surveys have shown that people always have 36% less expectation to respond than the recipient thinks.
So, on every email, either stress in the subject line or the first line of the message that this is either non-urgent or that you need an answer by, say, close of business Wednesday latest.
This then allows the recipient to consider their response and probably do a better job when replying. It also allows him to batch and send when it bests suits them
Is there anything here that you can take on to help you, or to help your recipients, perform better with emails as each day the number of emails being sent just grows and grows so anything we can do to get these numbers under control will help us in other areas.
I’d welcome your thoughts in the comments below and what you are going to do yourself!
