Member Article

Less is more. The art of being brief

How many times a day do you send of emails and hear nothing back? For me its multiple, every day of the week. Sometimes even urgent requests or needs are being ignored, so this made me think why. What is it about my email that causes people to not respond or worse not even open it?

I started to copy myself into my own emails so I could read them from the other perspective and to my surprise I started to see where I was going wrong. The majority of my emails where full of content and lengthy paragraphs but only actually included a few lines of necessary context. I would write my emails as though I was having a face to face conversation instead of getting to the points and details. I found online some research that shows the average professional receives 304 emails per week, checks their smartphone 36 times an hour and gets interrupted every eight minutes (or 50 to 60 times per day), given that, it’s not hard to imagine why our attention spans are shrinking (from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight in 2012). A brief email, on the other hand, with a strong subject line that explains the purpose of the email and grabs the reader’s attention is more likely to be read and taken seriously.

I found a good breakdown of being brief online:

B (Background): Provide a quick context—what prompted the update? R (Reason):: Explain why you’re speaking now—why should they pay attention? I (Information):: Provide two to three key nuggets of information you want to share. What are the bullet points of the conversation? E (End): Decide on what note you want to leave the conversation. In this case, you may want to end by telling your manager what you will do to get the project back on track. F (Follow-up):: Consider the questions you anticipate your boss will ask you when you finish speaking and prepare answers in advance.

By just adjusting my emails in this simple way I very rarely get ignored and 9 times out of 10 get a response within 30 minutes.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by GJ Stobart .