6 Mistakes That Look Dumb In Email

These are six things that will make you look stupid in email. In some cases breaking these rules will make you lose your job. In others they will simply annoy your readers. If you have any suggestions that should be added, please leave a comment.

1. Put Your Entire Message In The Subject

Just because you can see the entire subject as you type it, doesn’t mean it will show up for your recipient the same way. Depending on their email program, it might even truncate it.

2. CC A Bunch Of Unrelated Recipients

If you need to send something out to a large number of people who don’t already know each other, don’t put them in the CC field. That broadcasts their email address to each other. There was a case a few years ago where a real estate agent did this to a group of people who were all looking for apartments in New York. People who received it were able to sell the email to other agents for thousands of dollars because it contained the email addresses of qualified leads.

You can use the BCC field if you need to send messages out to a bunch of people. Put your own email address in the TO field. That way recipients can’t see each other’s email addresses and no matter what they hit any response will come back to only you.

3. Hit Reply All Instead Of Reply

I don’t really know how you could do this accidentally, but I’ve seen it happen many times. I’m guessing that some people have mail programs where the Reply and Reply All buttons are very close together. Other times I think people are just being lazy and hit Reply All (to 100 people) instead of taking the time to add the three people who need to see their reply.

4. Send A Message To A Superset Of People Who Need It

Lets say you have a group called Administration that contains the CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, CSO, and all the other C executives. Don’t send a message to the group when it really only needs to go to a smaller number of people in the group.

Sometimes people are too lazy (or don’t know how) to figure out who is in the group they are using. With Outlook, you can click on the + by the group name to show a list of everyone in the group.

5. Leave Out Punctuation

writing in all lowercase with no punctuation doesnt make you look intelligent take the time to use correct punctuation it will make your message easier to understand

Arghh. That was painful to write. Email is often considered informal, but punctuation rules are there for a reason. They really do make it easier for people to understand what you are saying. In some cases leaving out punctuation can give you rsentences an entirely different meaning.

6. Leave Out Paragraphs

Similar to leaving out punctuation, writing one big blob of text does not make your email easy to read. In fact, many people will skip over long messages that they can’t easily scan–especially if they happen to get your message on a cell phone or Blackberry.

Ok there are my six suggestions of things to avoid in email. If you have any suggestions to add, please leave them in the comments.

Habit List Course

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Using the Habit List

30 Days - 10 lessons

This course explains the Habit List–a method of tracking habits you want to develop that shouldn’t be on your regular todo list. It explains the theory behind the list and includes the popular PDF allowing you to print your own Habit List. (In Testing: Signup Below for Beta)

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Online Backup Options

I’ve been trying out several online backup tools. I plan to write in more detail about my experiences with each one later, but here is an overview.

My wife and I travel quite a bit. While I can take an extra hard drive with us for backups, but this seems a bit pointless since the biggest threat to my equipment is probably theft. If someone breaks into my hotel room and steals my laptop, they probably aren’t going to overlook an external hard drive. I need a solution that will give me quick access to all my information if my computer is stolen or damaged.

Here are three services I’ve tried.  If you have any suggestions of other services I should check out please post them in the comments.

.mac Backup

This would seem like the ideal solution, but until recently .mac accounts only came with 1 GB of storage space. They recently upped this to 10 GB. This is more useful, but it doesn’t take long to fill it up. On the plus side of things, it can be scheduled to run automatically to keep your backup up-to-date.

The .mac Backup software will also allow you to backup to DVDs, CDs and external HDs. So I could conceivably come up with a plan that backs large files that don’t change much up to external media while storing all of my documents that are smaller but change frequently online.

As I move toward a paperless office, my storage needs are just going to go up and I don’t think .mac Backup is going to be able to keep pace. I’m still using it for backing up certain documents just for added redundancy, but I’m not using it as my main backup system.

Mozy

Mozy is an interesting idea. For about $5 per month you can backup everything on your computer. (I have heard that in reality they have a limit of 50 GB of online storage space.) Mozy has a nice looking client that installs and lets you setup your backup to run automatically. However, I was never able to get it to backup more than about 20MB at a time. After weeks of emailing them for support I finally gave up. I have heard that their Windows product is much more stable, but I haven’t tested it. Support said that other OS X users were not having problems.

If you have a PC this might be worth looking into as it is fairly inexpensive.

They also offer a business class service that can backup databases and email servers.

Jungle Disk and Amazon S3

Jungle Disk doesn’t actually store any of your data. They just make a product that allows you to upload your data to Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is a storage service with a pay-as-you-go pricing setup. You pay $0.15 per GB of storage space. So 20 GB of storage will cost you about $3. You also have to pay for your transfers. That is an additional $0.10 per GB transfered into the system and $0.18 per GB transfered out. There is also a $0.01 charge for each PUT, GET, or LIST request.

Jungle Disk automatically keeps track of what changes on your system and uploads a new version of the file whenever necessary to keep the online copy up todate. If make changes to huge files every day, you’ll pay more than if you make changes to small files because the entire file has to be uploaded–not just the changes.

My experience in uploading around 20 GB of data and running a backup for about a week was in the $15 range for the month. Obviously a good deal of the expense is just getting the data uploaded the first time. After the first month I’d expect to pay $5 to $10 per month to Amazon.

The Jungle Disk program is $20 and that gives you a license to install it on as many computers as you like. It works with Windows, Linux and Mac so it is a pretty good deal if you have multiple machines.

Jungle Disk recently came out with an added service that gives you additional capabilities.  Most notable is the block level backup.  If you change a file the software will figure out what is different between the file on your computer and the one on the server and upload just the changes.  If you make a lot of changes to large files this can really reduce the amount of bandwidth required to keep the server in sync.

Don’t forget if you have any suggestions of other services to try, I’d love to hear about them.

Tuesdays Tip: Time for Reading

This might be a personal idiosyncrasy, but I bet I’m not the only one it applies to. When I don’t spend some regular time reading, I start feeling drained of creative ideas. And I’m not talking about spending some time reading articles on the web, I’m talking about sitting down with an actual physical book and doing some good old fashioned reading.

I suppose this makes sense. If you are constantly trying to produce using the creative part of your brain you need to be feeding it new stuff, but I suspect that the effect goes well beyond just having some new ideas to think about. Reading (at least for me) seems to trigger new ideas about totally different subjects. So spending some time reading about biology helps me come up with ideas for articles here at this blog.

My guess is that when we read new material, our brains fire off connections that haven’t been fired before. When we approach other problems, the previous exercise helps us make new and different connections–even when it isn’t at all related to the material we were reading.

So my strategy for dealing with a feeling like I have no more ideas is to spend some time reading a good book and some time exercising. Does this seem to work for anyone else besides me?

Understanding How Different Genders Think

One of my consulting clients has a company thats purpose is to help lower the divorce rate in America. One of their big goals is to teach people how to understand each other. Here is a short excerpts of one of their videos explaining the difference between the way men and women think.

Obviously this is a generalization, but it is a useful reference point for planning discussions with people of the opposite sex–not just your spouse. For example, if you are a woman trying to negotiate a business agreement with a man you should be aware that he is less likely to see the holistic benefits of the arrangement. He is more likely to view the deal in isolation instead of seeing the advantages (which will be much more obvious to you) of all the side effects that might be beneficial for both of your companies.

If you are a man trying to sell a business arrangement to a woman, you will have an easier time if you can push the side benefits and focus on how the deal with help both of your companies holistically.

A small amount of thought along the lines of “how will the other person perceive what I’m saying” can go a long ways toward creating successful mutually beneficial agreements–both in your personal and business life.

Thinking For Yourself

This morning I read a news article that started out:

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — Some women in Springfield are regretting their decision last week to get a tattoo from a door-to-door tattoo salesman. link

Um.  I think I would have seen that one coming.  One of the biggest differences I noticed in Mexico was the fact that people expect to rely on their own good judgment.   In the US I find people tend to think:

• If it is legal it is right.
• If it is for sale, it must be safe.
• If I’m not physically prevented from doing something it must be ok.

In the US if you are near a cliff there would be a rule that says you aren’t allowed to go near the edge.  There would probably be a fence or other obstacle to keep you away from where it is considered dangerous.  In Mexico, there would be no such rule.  If  you are lucky someone might say “you might want to avoid going near the edge of the cliff because it is slick and you might kill yourself”.  In Mexico you are expected to think for yourself–if you do something dumb and get hurt it isn’t any one else’s fault. (At least that was my experience there.)

While I appreciate the extra safety in the US, I’m concerned that we’ve take away so much basic responsibility from people that they no longer feel the need to run things through even a basic level of safety checks.  If someone shows up on your doorstep with homemade tattoo equipment and offers to give you a “great deal”  something somewhere in your brain should sound a warning bell.

I suppose common sense is a difficult thing to teach, but I’m afraid our society is teaching people to how to ignore it.

Best Time to Look for a Job

The best time to look for a job is when you don’t need one. That probably sounds counter intuitive, but let me explain. When you need a job, you are in the worst bargaining position possible. Anytime you put yourself in a position where you can’t walk away from a deal–or where it is hard to walk away–you lose your advantage in negotiating.

I found out about a job opportunity that would have been the perfect fit for a friend of mine. I told him about it, but he didn’t want to apply because he was happy with his current job. This is they way most people think. If I like my job, why should I go to the trouble of getting my resume ready and talking to someone else? What most people (including my friend) don’t realize is that being happily employed may make you a much more attractive employee to the company looking to hire. (If you were hiring would you rather hire a qualified candidate that someone else decided they didn’t want, or one that another employer wants to keep.) It also puts you in a position where you can turn down anything except for a truly great opportunity.

Another advantage is gaining negotiating experience. You are much better off honing your negotiating skills when failure doesn’t mean you’ll miss a mortgage payment. If you don’t have any income coming it, it probably isn’t a good time to be experimenting.

Reader Questions

In the next few weeks I’m going to start posting answers to reader questions every Friday.  I’m going to start off with some existing questions that have come in via email or on Google searches, but I wanted to open it up to everyone.

If you have a question you think would be interesting to see answered here, please send it to questions@productivity501.com.

Advice for Setting up a Home Office - Group Interview

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I recently emailed a number of bloggers asking them for the most important non-intuitive piece of advice for setting up a home office. Here are their responses along with my thoughts. If you find a response that seems especially relevant to you, consider subscribing to the author’s blog rss feed (included below).

I learned this from Tannaz Sassooni, one of my favorite Wise Bread bloggers: Put an old fashioned egg timer on the desk. When I start a long or boring project, I’ll set the timer at 15 minutes, and no matter what happens, I’ll force myself to take a break when the alarm goes off. At first I thought the timer will (a) stress me out or (b) distract me. But it turned out to be a great idea. I often procrastinate because I hated doing long and boring projects. But if I promise myself a 15 minute break no matter what, I’m much more likely to be productive. The gentle ticking of the timer is also a lot of fun. I sometimes pretend I’m a spy trying to break top secret codes from the NSA, while in reality I’m just answering emails from cool bloggers like yourself.

Will Chen from Wise Bread (rss)

This is actually one of the techniques I recommend in the Procrastination Prevention Course–although I haven’t ever tried the NSA spy scenario.

Piece of Advice for Home Office/Workspace: Invest in a comfortable chair. I’ve found that the investment easily pays for itself (unlike many superfluous environment purchases) by allowing you to focus on your work instead of an uncomfortable seat.

Scott H Young from ScottHYoung.com (rss)

Right now at my desk I have a very comfortable chair that took me well over a year to locate. I’ve been very happy with it and it is now over seven years old. Since we travel a lot I’ve found that I can usually adjust to just about any seat. The worst one I had to deal with was a metal folding chair in Mexico that would collapse 2 or 3 times each day.

Firewall your attention. Depending on your sensitivity to interruptions, this could be as simple as closing a door, or as complex as configuring software to keep you from browsing the World Wide Time Sink when you’re supposed to be working.

Bren Connelly from bren : blog (rss)

Firewalling your attention is a good way to put it. Sometimes the things we expect to act as inspiration are actually distractions when we are trying to work.

Get a door you can close. Make sure you can shut yourself off from the daily grind at home. It’s very tempting to work in the livingroom or have your spouse or kids come in every time for some fun or little questions. Make the agreement that when the door is closed, no one is allowed in.

Frank Meeuwsen from What’s The Next Action (rss)

The closed door can help a lot. Sometimes it also helps to put your office in a part of the house that isn’t in the middle of where everyone else is. An office in the basement or somewhere else out of the way can help make you just a little less accessible.

The closed door can also help you make the mental disconnect from being at home that is very important in getting work done. I’ve heard of people who work at home who leave the house and walk around the block to “go to work” and then leave their home office and walk around the block to “go home” at the end of the day.

Let me start by saying non-intuitive to me is different than to many people. Clients hire me because my training and experience in setting up offices is based on knowing what works. So, your question flips around for me to be: what mistake does most people make in setting up their workspace.

My top piece of advice in setting up an office that many people don’t consider is: be sure to take whether you’re right or left handed into account. Your orientation will impact where vital components are situated from your lighting to file location to monitor & keyboard location.

If you have a desk light it should not cast a shadow on your work over your writing hand. Thus, lefties should have a desk light in the upper right corner of their desktop and visa versa for righties. Your keyboard and monitor should be positioned so that you can put paper and pen on your natural writing side. I’ve worked with clients that have to continually reach over their keyboard to write. It’s a slow and uncomfortable position.

Susan Sabo from Productivity Cafe (rss)

This isn’t something I have ever thought about. However in looking at my desk, it looks like I’ve done most of this on accident. Anything I need to grab is on the right hand side of my desk. My lamp is the “wrong” side though. I’m guessing that it hasn’t bothered me because I do so little handwriting and I have other light sources.

I think many people don’t realize how dramatically the way you arrange your office furniture and storage in your home office space affects your productivity. So many home offices I go into have all their furniture up against a wall. They also work facing the wall which is not good for their eyes and can cause eyestrain and headaches if they don’t get up often.

The desks many people use at home today don’t have supply drawers handy, so their supplies end up all over the place and they lose efficiency. They also don’t have file drawers built in. So people buy file cabinets - but don’t place them near their desk so they can use them constantly as they work. Not having handy filing space encourages them to create TO FILE piles and even worse piles all over the floor behind them. Things get lost, damaged, stepped on and more. Don’t even get me started on what I’ve seen pets do to the piles people have on the floor.

The first thing I usually do with people after we get everything picked up and sorted out is rearrange the space. Usually into an L or U shape to create lots of storage and workspace. This way we can create a designated zone for everything they need to do and the supplies they need to do it. Most important is to create a home for all the paper they use regularly. We create homes for action paper, reference paper / files, space to hold binders, and sometimes spaces to hold their piles off the floor. Then we do whatever is necessary to create homes for supplies. We create supply storage using baskets, boxes, or setting up monitor risers.

You can see photos and examples of what I mean in my Office Organizing photo gallery at: http://www.neatandsimple.com/gallery/index.html

Ariane Benefit from Neat & Simple Living (rss)

I’ve have my two desks setup as an L shape although I’ve considered going to a single desk since I think everything would fit. Ariane’s before and after pictures are pretty interesting to look at.

Make it your own. By this I mean: (a) set up your space for how look like to work, e.g., minimalist, uber-organized, or even creative-chaotic; (b) do what you can to make it a space where you *want* to be; and (c) most importantly, make it a space where no one else goes - you can’t be productive if you’re constantly interrupted by others.

GTD Wannabe from GTD Wannabe (rss)

Good advice. I once had a friend who went to an interview and came back very excited. He said that they had a very lenient policy with how you setup/decorated your office space–even to the point that if you wanted to bring in sand for your floor to make it feel like a beach that was fine. While this might be a bit extreme, (and I’m sure the sand would have a negative effect on computer equipment) it is good to think about what works for you. Just because someone else is super organized doesn’t mean that is the best for your working style. I’m not suggesting that you try to be disorganized, but some people actually work better with what looks like a small amount of chaos.

Begin forming diligent work habits from Day 1: if you allow yourself to lay on the couch and watch TV instead of working, this will become
your habit. Instead, develop a routine that will find a balance between getting the work done and enjoying your home office. That routine might include:

• Showering and dressing before you work (you’re more productive that way).
• Making a list of the 3 things you want to accomplish today.
• Starting on the first thing on that list before you check email.
• When you finish a task on your list, reward yourself with something fun.
• Only check email twice a day.

Your individual routine will vary depending on your style and needs, but the key is to have a routine and make it a habit.

Leo Babauta from Zen Habits (rss)

This is great advice for anyone working from home. You have to approach it like a “real” job. If you wouldn’t wear your pajamas to work, you probably shouldn’t wear them to work in your home office.

Checking email twice a day can be a very big time saver for some people. It doesn’t work for me personally because most of the work I do for clients is over email. However I have learned to stop checking email when it is a distraction. For example, if I’m writing a letter and get stuck on how to word something, my tendency is to jump over and check my email. This isn’t helpful and I training myself to stop it.

Separate it from the rest of your life - This advice works two ways:

1. It’s difficult to be productive if you’re in the middle of everything else going on at home, the vacuuming, the kids playing, etc. Make sure you can isolate yourself from anything else going on at home.
2. When it’s time to take a break from work, don’t have it sitting where you can see it. You will be distracted by the thought of uncompleted work. If your home office space needs to do double duty, have some way of closing off your work when you are done for the day.

Ian McKenzie from Ian’s Messy Desk (rss)

For a lot of people the biggest struggle in working at home is being able to switch off work mode and switch on home mode. Shutting down your computer can be one way to literally turn off work mode when you can’t physically shut off your work space.

How many drawers and shelves do you REALLY need? If you plan to have places to stick stuff, you will accumulate even more stuff to put there. But if you plan a spartan space with few hiding/sticking places, you will have to think twice about all those papers and doodads that come into your office. My suggestion: one pencil-type drawer and a place for some files.

Andrew Flusche from Legal Andrew (rss)

This is a very interesting suggestion. Obviously you need to have adequate storage space, but too much storage can encourage bad habits. I’m not sure I could get by with one pencil drawer and a place for files. That wouldn’t give me any place to store spare batteries, extra cables, backup cell phone, broken ipod speaker, my old wallet, random extension cords, boxes from items I no longer have, money from foreign countries, a voip adapter with no power cable, a cool metal box that I found, 5 rocks (???), and an old laptop. Hm… Maybe I do need to cut down on my storage space. Very good suggestion.

Letting Go of Paper

I’ve been surprised at how difficult it is to let go of my paper. As I move more and more of my paper to a digital format I keep finding myself hesitating when I get ready to shred a document. We are trained so very well to keep our paper records. Has anyone else experienced this?

I think part of the issue is that most people have suffered some type of data loss with their computer. Even though I have multiple systems in place for backup I’m still haunted by losing important files years ago. Another issue is the physicalness of paper. You can hold paper in your hand. Spread it out. Write notes in the margin, etc. Not that I ever do that with my car insurance statement or gas bill, but somehow the idea of having something physical is comforting.

Little by little I’m training myself to let go. One trick I’ve found is to not shred the paper right away. I simply put it on top of the shredder to shred later. My daughter’s sleeping schedule was the original reason for this habit, but it is easier to give myself a few hours–just in case I think of some reason a document needs saved. So far I haven’t come up with any reason to save something that I was planning on shredding, but it makes me feel more comfortable.

My files have stopped growing and are starting to shrink!

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