Happy & Healthy
this is why e-mails are going to be the death of us
A recent study has shown that we spend 6,5 hours (seriously, six-and-a-half-hours) reading, writing and answering e-mails every day. As soon as I open my inbox in the morning, I’ve got at least 10 fresh new mails waiting to be opened. A few from Net-a-Porter, some fashion news updates, people offering their services and other things that aren’t necessarily important for me to look at. Each day, we get so bombarded with e-mails that we run the risk overlooking the important ones (like these) as well as the fun messages due to all the other crap we get sent. So here are a couple of tips from myself and people I know that are going to make your e-mail like a hell of a lot easier.
Delete all
Spoken like a true Insta-girl. She sometimes gets up to 400 e-mails a day (!) and clearly doesn’t have the time to tea them all. Her solution? “Delete them all. If it’s really important, they’ll send me another e-mail. Or they’ll give me a call.” Doesn’t get more straight forward than that.
Stop CC’ing
I used to work at a large media conglomerate, also known as the Dutch ministry for magazine publishing. I loved working there, but it was a little over-regulated – to put it nicely. They even had an assembly hall committee that spent their time organizing parties and gatherings in the (you guessed it); assembly hall. Great.
In a company that large, everyone is divided up into different divisions and different divisions means a whole lot of e-mails from a whole lot of people in CC. Care to guess what happens to those e-mails? Nobody reads them. And if they do, they don’t read them well. Here’s my advice; quite CC’ing. Plus, the term has a nasty ring to it. As if you’re being a tattletale. Just forward the e-mail to the person you are hoping to notify about whatever you’ve written about. At least that way it’s more personal.
No BCC
BCC, also known as the blind copy conforms, is equally nasty, if not worse. I’m not going to lie and say I haven’t done it before, but it never felt right when I did. The receiver doesn’t know that someone else is reading along and that thought alone doesn’t sit well with me. And what if the person who you put in the BCC accidentally answers by clicking ‘reply all’ and writes: “That’ll teach her, what a whiny bitch”… I’d like to see how you’d manage to get out of that little pickle.
Use an automatic reply
Make it clear in your automatic reply that you get a lot of e-mails and that it might take some time for you to reply back to them. And if you’re completely swamped with work and have the balls to do it, just flat out write that you can’t reply to every e-mail. You’d make me proud!
Unsuscribe
Do this every day. Unsubscribe from all the spam you receive on a daily basis.
The best thing for your e-mail when you’re on a vacation. Set up your automatic reply which’ll indicate that you aren’t available, who they should contact instead and that the e-mail they sent will be deleted. There’s no better homecoming than an empty mailbox.
Now it’s time to put those 6,5 hours into some fruitful labor. And a Net-a-Porter e-mail every now and then…
