Making Your Email More Effective; A Lesson From Lincoln

This past President's Day Mary Schmidt had a posting Write Like Lincoln suggesting that we resist the urge to "flame" someone or send a "nasty gram" email when we were upset.  In her post Mary referenced Tim Sanders post Write letters like Lincoln, to yourself.  The suggested technique is to go ahead and write the email and then send it to yourself and then wait to read it.  Hopefully after you see it in "print" and have cooled down you may be more inclined to approach this in a more constructive manner. 

Abraham Lincoln is famous for doing this.  He would vent his frustrations with his generals in letters he would never send.  This gave him the emotional release with out hindering his ability to inspire and lead.  What an excellent idea.

In following the links from Mary's blog to Tim Sanders I discovered that he has a number of excellent suggestions for dealing with email.

I don't know if email has greatly improved our ability to communicate or severely reduced it.  While it provides us with critical information quickly it also overloads us with useless noise.  Talk to any business executive and you soon get an earful about the problem of email overload.  Fortunately, Tim Sanders has a number of postings on email that can reduce the emails you send and receive and make your emails more meaningful.

A few of his rules include:

• Make your emails CLEAR compliant.  CLEAR is an acronym for a method of writing emails that will make them shorter and to the point and reduce the number you receive if you and your colleagues follow its simple guidelines
• Write like Lincoln - Just send the nasty grams to yourself
• How to master the subject line to get your email read
• Don't say no in an email.  Tim includes a video clip where he explains the limitations of email in conveying true meaning and intent and why you shouldn't say no via email

These rules go way beyond the typical email guidelines you typically find.  Tim gets to the heart of email and can make it a much more effective tool.  Take a look.  Better yet, implement these in your company so everyone can benefit.

If this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• Email Disclaimers and the Road to Hell
• 99 Email Security, Netiquette and Productivity Tips
• Or the posts in the "PCs and Email" category

Comments

[Ernie Perez]

I actually send "in your face' notes to myself and then when I get them I reassess what it is that I really want to accomplish. This processes WORKS!!

[Mike]

Ernie,

It truly is a great idea. Also with many corporate email systems you can set that email to go out after a pre-determined amount of time. That allows you to build in a certain amount of "cool down" time before you get self-delivered nasty gram.

Mike