1. Tone
If you don’t consciously insert tone into an email, a kind of universal default tone won’t automatically be conveyed. Instead, the message written without regard to tone becomes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his own fears, prejudices, and anxieties.On email, people aren’t quite themselves: they are angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and duplicitous. . . . There’s a reason for this. In a face-to-face (or voice-to-voice) conversation, our emotional brains are constantly monitoring the reactions of the person to whom we’re speaking. We discern what they like and what they don’t like. Email, by contrast, doesn’t provide a speedy real-time channel for feedback. Yet the technology somehow lulls us into thinking that such a channel exists.
The exclamation point is a lazy but effective way to combat email’s essential lack of tone.
Because of email’s inherent affectlessness, a little flattery never hurts, and it’s sometimes necessary to be extravagantly polite.
2. Responsiveness
A 2006 survey asked office workers if they would consider it rude not to receive a response to an email within three hours. 50% said they would. What’s more, one in 20 expected to hear back within five minutes.Jack Welch … believes that responding to an email request with an absolute “There’s just no way I can do that, but good luck” is a greater kindness than answering with a “Maybe” that’s never going to happen.
If you get and send more than 100 a day (the average for white-collar workers is 140), that’s roughly 30,000 a year. And if you’re in, oh, the 300-a-day-club, you’re dealing with 100,000 or so emails a year. It’s hard to think of anything else we do 15,000 to 100,000 times a year. Except breathe. Or blink. And those don’t normally require a tremendous amount of thought.
3. Time Suck
You often don’t know if an email is worth opening until you open it; opening it takes time and attention; the interruption can eat away at productivity. After a worker has been interrupted with a message, it generally takes nearly half an hour for him to return to his original task. And that’s assuming he returns to that original task.4. Forwarding
Rule: Never forward anything without permission, and assume everything you write will be forwarded.Write your apology with the expectation that it will be forwarded without your permission.
