Right, I’ve been dwelling on and battling with this “issue” for a very long time. In fact, calling it an “issue” I think is far too kind, it is, without a shadow of a doubt, a 400 year old, oak tree trunk sized, pain in the backside!

Yep, thats right, we all have it, you cant get away from it, and its name is email.

Over the next few days, although it may turn into weeks, I’ll make some time to chew the email cud, and throw out some of my thoughts and rant-ish musings on the subject.

Lets lighten the mood somewhat now methinks, with our friend, well, hes my friend anyway, Dilbert.

My personal pet hates when it comes to email

I realise these are my pet hates, but feel free to hate them too, the more people hating them, will lead, lets hope, to fewer people doing them, and onward to the victorious world of “better email”. Hmm, well, I guess anythings possible, right?

To start with theres little point talking about spam, and the fact that supposedly my girlfriend is unsatisfied in bed, or that some Nigeria prince, if there were such things, would like to give me millions of dollars. So lets not. Any intelligent person has by now discovered “the spam filter”, just deal with it, and live with it.

Technical side note: If everyone would just check the damn SPF records on all email/domains before relaying them, spam would for the most part, go away. End of said technical side note.

Now, I’ve not ranked these, perhaps I should, then again, perhaps I’d rather scribble (or type) out this post and go watch a film?

1. Emails with no subject – I’m going to just start deleting emails that come in without a subject from now on, or add the subject, “OI, YOU FORGOT THE SUBJECT”.
2. Long emails – its always good to hear from friends with long updates, and those aren’t really what I would call “day to day” emails, nor the long emails that I hate. How many times have you had emails for meetings, outlining the agenda, and all the points to be covered, with a little breakout on each point? Well, if we’re going to do the whole thing on email, I may as well stay in bed, whats the point of going to the meeting. Its not complicated people, email to outline high level points, then pick up the damn phone or fire up a video call, or arrange a meeting (although unnecessary meetings are another pet hate, perhaps theres another post in there somewhere).
3. Emails reminding me about your email – its in my process queue, I’ll deal with it on *MY* time, unless of course you’re paying for the privilege of an immediate response.
4. People who treat email as an immediate form of communication – *phone rings* “I sent you an email asking you to call me 5 mins ago, and I’ve not heard from you”… well, was it that hard for you to just call me? It cant have been, as you managed to work out what all the scary buttons on the phone do in 5 minutes.
5. Responses from people, where they haven’t answered my original question or addressed the original issue that I had emailed them about in the first place. Come on!
6. When a reply contains anything that looks like, or could mean something like, “I sent you another email about that stuff earlier, see that email”. Clearly you have time to waste! You could have simply replied with the answer to my specific issue, but instead you refer me to a previous email. So you spend the time sending a reply and typing out words, but don’t bother actually being any help, what-so-ever… links to point 5.
7. Signatures – you only need to send your signature with all your info, your logo, measurements, blood type, CV, family pictures, your corporate disclaimer and whatever else you’ve decided that you need to share with me; *ONCE*. If you’re initiating the communication, include it on your original email only, theres no need to stick it on every single reply, or is there? Perhaps you’d be so kind as to explain why to me, no, really, I want to understand this. To be fair, until recently I was guilty of doing just this, until it dawned on me, just how utterly pointless it was.
8. That stupid, irritating, and more useless than the right honorable Gordon Brown when it comes to fiscal policy; please consider the environment “tree logo” – who the hell thought this thing up?! Its an email, I’d only need to print it if I *NEEDED* a hard copy, i’ll press print if I need to, I don’t need to be reminded by a silly little green tree asking me to “consider the environment”.

Righto, that’ll do for now. I know there are many many more, and perhaps one day we shall all work together to compile a big book eBook (the little green tree logo people got upset), and pass them into law, or should that be eLaw? Perhaps we could call it “the ebook of knowing how to use email, and if you break them, we’ll break your internets” – people are always complaining that the “internet is down” anyway, therein lies a rant for another day I think!

Watch out for the follow up to this, which will be more useful, I’ll go into how I actually deal with the masses and masses of transactional and business emails I get on a day to day basis. It’ll be worth it, you’ll see, email management is becoming one of the most important soft skills that you can have these days.

Anyway, for now, Hamlesh out.