The first step toward taming your email is by starting with the person in the mi
The first step toward taming your email is by starting with the person in the mirror. Master your own email habits before you tackle everyone else’s.
Send Fewer Emails
If you send out fewer emails, you will receive fewer. Always ask yourself if an email needs to be sent out or if it can wait until later.
Delay Sending Emails
Most of the email services available have a delayed delivery option. Ask yourself if you can delay sending the email until 9am the next morning. If you can, then do.
- Outlook Desktop App: Delay or schedule sending email messages
Don’t Hit Reply-All
How many of us have been a part of an email chain where everyone was responding to the whole group and twenty people were being spammed when they didn’t need to? The fewer people on an email, the fewer responses you’ll get back, so stop and ask yourself if you really need to hit reply-all. You need to hit reply-all if more than one person needs to know the email was responded to, if your response will influence others, and if the email impacts 70% of the people on the chain[1].
Use Blind Carbon Copy More
BCC is a great way to keep people in the loop even when they are not the primary person an email is intended for. If you BCC on emails, then other people will not be able to hit “Reply-ALL” and spam the whole group. The BCC’d recipient will know the email is sent without being subjected to all the chatter that happens afterward. This is especially important when you’re sending to large groups.
Don’t Send Many Emails When One Will Do
Use your drafts or a notes app to keep track of things that you want to send people that are not urgent. Once you hit three things, then send the email with three things instead of sending three separate emails.
Give Yourself Time to Back out
I have a rule that every email I send gets held in my outbox for one minute, which is plenty of time for me to realize that I shouldn’t send something. I can go delete it or move it to a draft before it gets sent. In Outlook, you can do this by creating a rule to defer delivery by one minute. If you’ve already started scheduling emails for the following morning, then you’ll also have plenty of time to back out of an email you shouldn’t send.
Have a Meeting, Phone Call, or Chat Instead
If it takes more than three emails, or if the email is going to be longer than a paragraph, just contact the person a different way. I have a personal rule that if I end up revising an email more than three times, it means I need to call them up and talk to them instead because the issue is too complex for email.
Always avoid email if you are breaking bad news to someone, if you are upset, or if you are resolving a conflict. Apologizing through email after the conflict is resolved is fine.
Bettina Buechel created a scale for deciding if things should be handled in email or in person by evaluating the scope of the media and the richness of the media[2]. In this scale, face-to-face communication is at the opposite spectrum as a blanket