It goes without saying that email is the bane of the workplace, not necessarily because of its nature, but because of the way it is used. For years, we’ve done everything we could to eradicate it and offer alternative tools, but to no avail: it remains the work environment’s center of gravity.
Email may therefore remain a necessary evil, but it is one whose harmful effects must be curbed as a matter of urgency, since it is a major contributor to the phenomenon of information overload, which has a worrying impact on both productivity and quality of life at work (Digital Infobesity: When Collaboration Tools Degrade Productivity, QWL and Amplify Mental Workload).
So, even if many people think it’s a losing battle, I don’t despair of one day seeing people use their email intelligently, and to help make that happen, I’d like to offer you a list of best practices for mastering your email inbox, before it becomes your boss.
1°) No attachments
With today’s tools, there’s no need to send a document as an attachment in the vast majority of cases: all you have to do is share the document in question.
There are two advantages to this.
Firstly, if it’s a document that the recipient(s) need to work on, they’ll be working on the same version, so you won’t have to do any reconciliation work.
Secondly, if the carbon footprint is a subject that interests or even concerns you, you should be aware that the footprint of emails between sending and storage in the various mailboxes is quite simply gigantic (Beyond the Inbox: Understanding the Carbon Impact of Emails and Why your Digital Workplace is hurting your organization’s performance).
2°) Copy only the number of people strictly necessary
Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you: by copying your e-mails to the whole world, you increase the informational load on these people.
Worse still, if it ever occurs to one of these people to reply, and in particular to reply to everyone, you’re going to generate a flow of conversations that will increase this load and, what’s more, become unmanageable and unreadable.
By doing so, you’re simply falling into the hamster-in-the-wheel syndrome, which means that once you start running, you keep on running. In this case, the more emails you send, the more you receive, the more you send in reply, etc. And once again, there’s the problem of the “hamster in the wheel” syndrome.
And then there’s the environmental issue.
3°) Don’t use email
Depending on the purpose, the audience, the criticality of the situation and the urgency, there may be more relevant tools than email.
I often say that email is the tool to use when you don’t expect a response, or no immediate response: the receiver treats it according to personal priorities.
In urgent situations, a chat or a phone call is more effective.
4°) Schedule your e-mails
If you want to work late, that’s your problem, not everyone else’s. If you write an email outside office hours , program it to be sent during working hours (“Send later” : a simple functionality to make it up with email)
Another benefit: you’ll be sure that it arrives at the top of the pile in the morning, and isn’t buried under those of people who have shown less consideration than you.
5°) Don’t make email a to-do list
I often say that your mailbox is other people’s to-do list.
In it, you’ll find a jumble of tasks that others have delegated to you, often in a terse fashion. Once again, it’s hard to keep track, cluttering up your inbox and contributing to information overload.
So once again, don’t do to others what you don’t like them to do to you.
There are shared todo list tools you can use.
6°) Be clear and precise in your requests
A poorly formulated, unclear or imprecise request, especially in writing, has two consequences.
The first is that the person will ask you for clarification, which can lead to a long and time-consuming exchange of e-mails, wasting your time and attention.
The second is that you won’t get the desired result.
After all, you put a lot of effort into writing quality prompts for ChatGPT, so do the same with humans (No one should be promoted to manager if they don’t know how to use ChatGPT).
7°) Be polite
I’m sometimes horrified by the tone used in certain e-mails. Sometimes because it suits the sender’s personality, but also because she’s running out of time and doesn’t realize the impact it can have on those who read it (Scoop: Humans read what you write!).
By doing so, you generate stress and even rampant hostility , which could one day explode and turn against you.
What’s more, it does nothing to improve people’s opinion of you.
8°) Put an end to long discussion threads
When you send an email and suddenly several of the recipients start not only replying to you, but to each other, it creates an unintelligible and counter-productive cacophony.
Email is not a messaging system!
When you see this type of exchange, put an end to it either by calling one of the people or by organizing a meeting with the necessary people, which will be the only way to respond to everyone and, above all, to align everyone on a common position and understanding.
If, on the other hand, your objective is to generate this exchange, there are more appropriate tools (Teams, Yammer, a forum…).
9°) Impose hygiene on yourself and share it with others
The problem with email is that some people’s good practices benefit others, but they don’t reap the same benefits in return.
If you’re a manager, write down and share your email hygiene rules with your teams, and above all set an example. In the end, it pays off, but don’t expect others to follow your best practices if you don’t follow theirs.
Bottom line
It may seem that the battle for good email practices is lost in advance, but don’t expect to suffer any less from other people’s practices if you don’t adopt a certain level of hygiene of your own.
