–Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and
author of Contagious:
Why Things Catch On.
How do you create an effective work routine? Simple: by choosing what you want it to be, rather than
letting others dictate it for you. Except that most people do exactly the opposite, through one simple
(terrible) habit: they check their email first thing in the morning…This means that their focus and energy
are going where others are directing it, rather than where they stand to make the greatest impact.
–Danny Iny is the founder of marketing education firm Firepole Marketing as well as the bestselling
author of Engagement
from Scratch! and The Audience Revolution
.
Think twice before you forward, cc, or bcc. As reported in an August 9,
2013, article in the
Wall Street Journal, London-based International Power
reduced total email traffic by 54 percent just by encouraging their top executives
to “think twice” before they forwarded an email or added anyone to the cc: line.
Too often we forward or cc someone in the spirit of keeping them “in the loop,”
but in reality we are contributing to the information overload problem.
Remember, every email you send and every cc you
include means you are likely
going to get a reply back into your own email box. If you
send less email, you’ll
also
receive less email.
Use the subject line to indicate the action required. An ideal subject line
doesn’t just indicate
the subject of the email, but also the type of action it
requires. This helps email recipients to process your email in less time. And
they’ll learn to reciprocate. The idea is to preface your subject line message with
some meta-information. I like to use all caps to make this part of the subject
stand out from the message. Here are some examples:
“FYI: [subject]”—Use the FYI designation when you are just
passing info along as a courtesy.
“ACTION REQUIRED by [DATE]: [subject]” or “TO DO by
[DATE]”—Use ACTION REQUIRED
when your recipients should
take an action, but they don’t report to you; use TO DO when you
are giving a directive to someone who reports to you.
“NRN: [subject]”—NRN stands for “no response needed” and can
be used to eliminate the polite response
emails that people often
send like “Thanks” or “Looks interesting” or “I’ll take a look at this
next week,”
etc.
“[subject]–EOM”—My personal favorite, EOM stands for “end of
message” and lets you put super short messages right in the subject
line.
EOM tells the recipient, don’t bother opening this one because
all the content is in the subject line.