Pick up the phone!

When you must communicate something emotional, pick up the phone or, if possible, arrange a face-to-face meeting.

"In one study participants thought that their sarcasm would be communicated 80% of the time. Face-to-face this was accurate, but over email the actual figure was 56%.

This overconfidence was also seen when people tried to communicate anger, sadness, seriousness and humour in an email. Without body language cues, it's hard to communicate more than literal meanings."

While emoticons are fun and can be helpful, they do not convey the breadth of emotion we convey in our body and facial language. If you must criticize, complain, or negotiate, try to get a face to face meeting with the other party. If that's not possible, at least use the phone where tone of voice cues help convey emotion. As a last resort, try a visual email tool, such as eyejot.

Every email costs 1 minute of distraction (in addition to reading and response time)

In a report of several studies of email use, Psyblog.com presents compelling reasons to limit email use:
1) every time we open an email, we need at least a minute to get our minds back to what we were working on previously
2) we open email far more frequently than we believe we do, with most people checking email every 5 minutes.

The report says we spend 23% of our work day checking email, or 110 minutes in an 8-hour work day. I'm not sure how many discreet emails this assumes, so I can't estimate how many minutes we spend getting our minds back into the task we were focused on before we opened email. However, I'm betting it's close to an hour.

Use email as a effectiveness and efficiency tool, not as a drain on your time and energy, by setting your email notification to 45 minutes rather than 5 (or immediate!) and disciplining yourself to check email only then.

Let me know how this works for you!

before you send that email . . .

Created by: Online IT Degree