Communications Infographic
I accidentally sent an email to the wrong person yesterday. No privacy violation problem with the email content, but very embarrasing of course. I am sure that every Slaw reader has misdirected an email at least one time. We have all probably dialed a wrong number on the telephone also. We may have texted the wrong person too.
Even though we all tell ourselves that we will carefully read the screen, we won’t rely on our email quick addressing options, we will keep our contacts updated, and all of the other best practices we can think of, these things happen. One problem is the amount of communication that we take part in.
A lovely Infographic at SocialTimes under the article title From Pigeons to Twitter: The Evolution of Communication shares some interesting stats. A trillion emails are sent annually. How many are you sending to the right contact? Do you have a communications best practice to share? Feel free to comment.
These are tips I got from Bruce Mayhew who specializes in communication and does training in email writing:
– compose the message
– edit and format the message for readability; put specific action items up front
– create the subject line. Be specific.
– add attachments
– add email address(es) last
Of course, most of these items have some best practices, too. My favourite are those that help save time and reduce number of email messages.
He has lots of info about email writing on his blog here: http://brucemayhew.wordpress.com/category/email-etiquette/
Attachments are my pet peeve – I see far more wrong attachments than wrong addresses.
I make it my practice to (after attaching attachments to a draft email) open every attachment to ensure I’ve attached the right document and the right version.
As well as Connie’s trick of adding the email address last, I also set up an Outlook rule to defer delivery of my emails by 1 minute. That one minute in the Outbox is the time I notice missing attachments and wrong recipients – and also occasionally decide that this email is better off not sent!