In recent years I’ve polled hundreds of people about their work in the digital age. This week, it’s what’s irritating about e-mail?
When people:
- Give no greeting or sign-off
- Provide incomplete information
- Send messages that have typos and poor punctuation and sentence structures
- Put quotes or sayings in their signatures
- Expect a reply in five minutes
- Ask questions that can’t be answered in an e-mail and that require a phone call
- Sound cold or inhuman
- Write overly short, curt messages
- Send long e-mails or send long e-mail chains that I have to go back into to get context while they write, “What do you think?”
- Don’t reread their words to determine if the wrong unwritten message was sent
- Send e-mails with mixed topics
- Use subject lines that don’t reflect the e-mail’s content
- Repeatedly put in the subject line “Please read” or “Urgent”
- Don’t use the addressee’s name
- Forward e-mails without asking
- Don’t respond
- Send something important via e-mail that deserves a phone call instead
- Send an e-mail rather than having the courage to talk to me directly
- Type with bold, caps, wild fonts, or red text
- Sit close by but send an e-mail instead of getting up and stopping by my office to ask a question
- Give one-word answers to complicated e-mails
- Don’t bother to read the e-mail trail and respond blindly
- Send long e-mails without paragraphing
- Don’t include a phone number or any other optional contact information
- Lazily hit Reply all when individual, targeted responses are necessary
- Write in an emotional state
- Take a tone in written form they’d never take in person
- Write as if they were in an informal conversation instead of being engaged in business correspondence
- Use abbreviations and emoticons
Now that you are reminded, refrain from doing the above!
