Spend Time on Business E-mail to Save Time

Not having enough time is becoming a business mantra. No one has time to do everything they claim they want or need, while using the “lack of time” excuse to not do things they know they should. If you think about it, it is just a matter of prioritizing and choosing what you feel you have time for — or not.

With your Business E-mail activities, it is crucial to be organized (Check out my previous article on E-mail Organization Tips.) Organization is key to being able to prioritize effectively.

Organizing, prioritizing and making time — saves us time. Making sure you get the responses you desire, means a little up front time on your behalf that can minimize unnecessary e-mails, thereby saving time later. The same applies when responding to incoming inquiries. How we handle each can in fact save us time. And we need every bit and byte of time we can salvage, right?

Part of being a true professional in your business e-mails is reflecting respect for the other sides time as well. This means you need to take some time in the first place to do a few things to get the desired response and make communicating with you as productive as possible:

Create a helpful and accurate Subject: field.
Include a greeting reflecting the necessary formality.
Ensuring your message is clear in intent, tone and desired action you want taken.
Communicate with proper grammar and always proof for typos.
Courteous sign off that includes your name.

Then, when responding to business e-mails, we need to take a bit more time to ensure:

You stay on topic and provide the requested response.
You answer the questions asked and provide the information sought. This minimizes back-and-forths because one side or the other glazed over direct requests. We do this by down-editing instead of top-posting.
Ensure your response is clear in intent, tone and desired action you need to be taken or are requesting.

Review every e-mail you send or receive to make sure you are in fact addressing all these points. This will minimize unnecessary e-mails and therefore — save time.

The idea for this post developed this morning as I received responses from e-mail requests I had sent out yesterday. Contacts hitting reply and typing out cryptic notes to one point while ignoring others is becoming quite common. Responses that did not address my direct requests or that were missing specifics I had clearly noted I needed were the rule — not the exception.

Increasingly e-mail is not the efficiency tool it once was or that many like to believe it is. While it is “easy” to whip off e-mails, without both sides taking the time and responsibility to take the above into consideration, we are creating more e-mails than necessary. That’s a time drain. Easy does not necessarily mean efficient. That’s why it behooves each of us to consistently work towards becoming efficient business e-mailers.

So while we all gripe about the volume of e-mail we have to manage, by taking the above approach when sending and replying, we will no doubt help to reduce everyone’s e-mail volume.

The thing is, everyone has to be on board or as I found this morning, once side ends up compensating for the others lack of effort by having to re-request, clarify or follow up — all of which could have been avoided by just taking a litte more time up front to save time in the long run.