Top 20 Time Management Tips For Dealing With Email

Here is a “Top-20″ list of Email tips that my time management seminar participants came up with during a brainstorming session. Keep these ideas in mind whenever you’re writing and sending e-mail.

1. If it’s appropriate, insert “No Reply Needed” in the “Subject” line or the opening of your e-mail. This can reduce the number of return e-mails that you receive.

2. Use pre-written responses to frequently asked questions or requests for information, such as directions, fee schedules, or “how-to” guidelines. Then cut-and-paste your replies.

3. Do a spell check before you send important e-mail.

4. Put enough details in the subject line so that recipients know right away what your e-mail is about, such as “Remember the team project meeting next week, 9/25.”

5. Have one e-mail per subject. People often respond to your first and last questions, but overlook or forget the others, so keep things simple. Use one e-mail to address the meeting reminder, for example, another the company picnic, and another the status of a particular report. Recipients can respond accordingly as they have the time and the necessary information.

6. Be aware that when you send e-mail, it could be forwarded to others and read by people you didn’t intend to see it.

7. A phone call is sometimes faster and easier than sending lots of back and forth emails.

8. If a person asks a series of questions in an original, reply by quoting each question (or enough of the question to make the context clear) and then put your answer after it. Do this by cutting out parts of the original message and inserting answers or other remarks at appropriate places.

9. Alert recipients if you’re going to send a huge file so they know that it might take a while to download or use a service like YouSendit.com.

10. If you forward a message, put your comments at the top rather than at the end.

11. Just reply to the sender, rather than to everyone on the sender’s list unless there’s a good reason to respond to everyone.

12. Don’t overuse capital letters or punctuation marks or you’ll appear MELODRAMATIC!!

13. If you don’t want everyone in a group to see each other’s e-mail addresses, send the e-mail as a blind copy (BCC).

14. Get an author’s permission before sending his or her personal e-mail to others. Then include the author’s name and any necessary copyright information.

15. Avoid using acronyms, such as BTW (by the way), IMHO (in my humble opinion), NRN (no reply necessary), or FWIW (for what it’s worth), which some of your readers might not understand.

16. Avoid sending emoticons. Not all your recipients will know what it means.

17. Avoid using fancy text, such as italics, bold print, and colors, which might not translate well to your recipient’s screen. These devices might appear as programming codes on your recipient’s screen.

18. If you have a choice to send information as text or in HTML format, stick to the text format.

19. Prepare long attachments for easy reading by breaking up long passages of text with subtitles.

20. If you spend a lot of time on the computer, rest your eyes frequently with a “far focus” technique: look as far away from yourself as possible (out a window, across the room, or down the hall). If you can’t do that, try closing your eyes for a minute or two.