Scott McInnes shares practical email habits for the COVID era: keep messages brief, use the third-paragraph test to find your core ask, favor short words, write in first person, and craft subject lines that state the action and deadline. Sometimes a phone call is faster.
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Hi there and welcome to this episode of Scott's Thoughts. Email was a bane of our life, was certainly getting to become a bane of our life before COVID started. And since it did start, I saw some stats the other day, it was incredible that the amount of email we're sending has gone up by 70%. So we're turning to email really, really quickly. And it's not always the best way. But look, when it is the best way, what I thought today might be useful was to give you some, some hints and tips and perhaps things to think about in order to make sure that when you do send a mail, that it does hit the mark, that it is necessary, that it does get the response that you're looking for, hopefully as quickly as possible. So some quick tips that I thought might be useful. Number one, quick tip for writing the best emails ever is Pick up the phone. Because remember, it's not always about sending an email. If you want to get a quick response to something, I think these days the email is where we go. We don't pick up the phone. We don't want to bother people. We don't want, you know, maybe they've got something else going on. We think that, you know, maybe actually I just won't bother. I'll just send a quick email. And of course, once we've sent an email to a quick thing that's on our list, we have to wait for the person to respond. It could be an hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, a day, 2 days, a few days. Whereas if we just picked up the phone, perhaps we'd have got the answer to our question there and then. Number 2, be brief. We have gotten into the habit of sending great big giant emails, and the ask is often buried right in the middle. We've often heard before that quote by Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, that I'm sorry that I had to send you such a long letter, but I didn't have time to write a short one. Being concise is hard. Editing takes time, but it definitely is worthwhile going back through what you've written, trying to cut out those words that you just don't need and just trying to get to the point where what you're looking for is very much up the front. Now, a great way of doing that is the third paragraph test. And that was something— or this is a little thing that John Simmons, who invented tone of voice, taught me, which was when you've written the first draft of your email, Take the third paragraph and put it up front, put it first. Now it's going to read very, very ugly, but what you've effectively done is taken the real meat and veg of the email, taken it and put it up first. This is what I need and here's why. So have a little think about that when you're writing the third paragraph test. Take that third paragraph, put it up front, then re-edit, and you'll find that you've got a much, much stronger email. Using short words is a very powerful thing as well. That can bring down the length of your emails, obviously, because you're using shorter words, but also it just cuts to the chase. Words like commence, when we can use start. I just think it's worthwhile just thinking about what those shorter words are that we can use, those more Anglo-Saxon words rather than the Latin-based words. So shorter words is really powerful. First-person pronouns. We are still in the, we still get in the really bad habit of saying things like the company, the staff, the employees, when it's an internal email. It's we and I and you and us and other first-person pronouns. It makes it much, much, much more personal. One that we always forget about, because largely when we're sending an email, it's about what we need to get from somebody else, is thinking about how that email might land with them. So, when I think about the tone of my email, it's worth stopping and thinking, if I open my email first thing on a Monday morning and read the email that I'm just about to send, how will that make me feel? It's about putting yourself in the shoes of the recipient. Is the tone right? Is the ask right? Is how I've said it right? And if you know the person really well and they know you really well, maybe that's different. If you don't know the person quite so well, That's different again. But thinking about how somebody might perceive or read or understand the tone of your email to be is really, really powerful. So have a little think about that before you hit the send button. How is this going to make the recipient feel? The title's a very important thing. And sometimes in organizations, what I've seen work really well is just within the title of the email, if we're getting in tons and tons of emails to our inbox, For information or for action first, then by when, today, tomorrow, this morning, and then the subject of the email, which can help people just sort through their emails. You're giving them a bit of a hand to get through their inbox. That can be very helpful. And then finally, the dreaded CC. And we know that, you know, people get CC'd on emails because we want to make sure that they know we've sent them, that we're making sure, you know, we CC it to their boss as well to make sure that the thing gets done and they see we've CC'd it to their boss. We end up with so much email flying around organizations that it's not funny. So just think about who actually needs to be CC'd on a mail. Maybe it's nobody, maybe it's a couple of people, but again, it's just worth spending a few minutes before we hit send, just thinking maybe a few of these little hints and tips through to make sure that you get the very, very best outcome from the time that you've invested in putting that email together. Thanks very much.
