Tag: email

Check it Twice

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

About a decade ago, I sent out an important email with a major mistake in it. The blowback was a mess.

Someone I was working with at the time—a former journalist who had both more wisdom and life experience than I had—told me that I was overdue for a practice that she’s employed for decades: any time she had something important to send out, she would hold off on sending it for a few hours or even a day, and come back to it a second time. She said that I needed a structural fix to my process, or I’d make that same sort of awful mistake time and again.

She was right. I’ve employed that tactic ever since and it’s saved me countless similar blunders.

(Aside: the “Schedule Send” feature in Gmail is a nice way to implement this.)

The goal of this extra step isn’t editing—the document is supposed to be finished—it’s simply to ensure there are no important mistakes or inconsistencies.

For the way my mind works, this step is most successful when I look at the “final” draft in a different form factor. So, if I’ve written it in Word or PowerPoint, maybe I read the final PDF instead. Or if I’ve written on my laptop, I reread on my phone (the latter works especially well with my blog posts). And, if it’s really important, I force myself to read the whole document out loud.

I also apply this approach to anything I write when my emotions are high. In these situations, my orientation is different: instead of rereading for content, consistency, and typos, I’m reading for what the content makes me feel, and where the emotional dial is set. More often than not, if the emotional vibe is negative, upon rereading I decide not to send the note at all, and instead to talk to the person directly. Negative things immortalized in writing rarely age well.

One of the deceptions of how we all work today is that all our communications seems quick and impermanent, when they are anything but.

Our words make as much impact as they ever have.

It might be time to build a habit of stopping, taking a breath, and reading what we wrote with fresh eyes.

Shaping the Path

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

In my first job out of business school, I was the most junior person in IBM’s Corporate Citizenship team. Stan Litow, the hard-charging ex-Deputy Chancellor of the NYC Schools, ran the group and was my boss’s boss.

Occasionally, I got to work directly with Stan, and “work” often meant doing the background research and preparing a draft document or an email for him to send out.

My barometer of success was simple. I tracked:

  1. The speed with which things I produced went out the door.
  2. The difference between what I produced and what finally got sent by Stan.

Naturally, the two were correlated: the closer I got to the target, the faster the end product was sent out.

I came to discover that it wasn’t just getting the content right that mattered. It also helped tremendously if I made it as easy as possible to turn my draft into the final product. This meant things like:

  • Drafting the outgoing email to accompany a file
  • Writing that email to make it sound the way Stan sounded
  • Succinctly explaining to Stan the context behind what I’d done and the recipient
  • Being completely clear what actions needed to be taken

While at the time I was enabling my boss’s boss, these behaviors continue to inform my actions to this day.

To be influential and drive action, part of our work is to make these actions as easy as possible – called “shaping the path” by behavioral economist Jonathan Haidt (Chip and Dan Heath also talk about this a lot in Switch). Shaping the path is the act of removing all friction between a person and the action you want them to take: giving students a printed map if you want them to go to a dorm and get a vaccine, for example, increases the number of students who get the shot.

Once you start paying attention to shaping the path, it’s addictive, especially in written communication (email/Slack).

You’re shaping the path every time you:

  • (email) Write a good self-contained forwardable email when you’re networking
  • (email) In an email, summarize your headlines in one sentence rather than assume that everyone will read the attachment
  • (email/Slack) Transform a paragraph into a numbered or bulleted list that is easy to digest
  • (Slack) Include a clickable link to a file to a colleague rather than a filepath
  • Encourage your team to take a specific action, and then model that action in verbal or written form
  • Use Docusign
  • Turn your Word Doc contract into an online Terms of Service
  • (email/Slack) Put all the information everyone needs in one place, more than once (as in, even after everyone has the calendar invite: “here are the materials for our meeting next Thursday from 10:00 to 11:00 am Eastern time and here’s the Zoom link”)
  • (email) Change the email subject line of an email to make it clearer what it’s about.
  • Are hyper-specific about what would be most helpful, or how you can help, and ask for just that (size of the action, amount of time) and nothing more.

Making everything a little easier for the people you interact with is a sign of both empathy and respect. It shows that you know how busy they are, and that you recognize how much time and energy it takes to task switch.

As a bonus, it’s more likely that people will do the things you’d like them to do and that they will feel great about it, because it was so easy for them.

Top 10 Slack tips for new users

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

After a couple of failed attempts, I’ve finally migrated to Slack for all communication at work. It’s not perfect, but I’m confident that it’s an improvement on email.

The benefits are significant. I spend much less time in my inbox –  it’s no longer the center of my work life, no longer a weed I have to hack back to submission.This is the main shift I’ve experienced, and it’s a big one.

It’s also cleaner to have email be for external correspondence, separate from Slack, which is internal. This makes it easier to track things and easier to know why I’m going into my Inbox.

Plus, Slack, in addition to feeling lighter and more responsive, has huge benefits in terms of transparency (easy to ‘see’ what is going on in channels even if you’re not the recipient of a message) and for new team members (who can see and search history).

This is my second attempt at Slack. After failing the first time, I’d been intending to shift over for more than a year but couldn’t muster the courage. I ended up following some braver folks at Acumen, and I’m very happy with the results.

In case you’re about to jump in, or thinking about it but not sure if it will work, here are my suggestions about how to achieve Slack success.

  1. All or nothing: this is the most important one. On the day (after you’ve set up Slack, channels, etc.) move your entire team to Slack. You can start with one team, not with your whole organization. But it won’t work if half of your team is on Slack and the other half is on email.
  2. No more email for internal communication: this is connected to #1. You have to agree that, for a period of time, everyone is going to use Slack for everything. Here’s a cue: if you find yourself sending someone an email and a Slack message because you’re not sure which tool to use, something’s wrong.
  3. Three month trial period: when we started, I hoped a two week trial period would be long enough. I was told I actually needed to give it three months. That was good advice.
  4. Set up the channels right: Have someone on your team/in your organization set up the right channels at the outset, a person who is detail-oriented and likes that sort of thing.
  5. Create a Learn Slack channel: Create an #all-learn-slack channel where folks can ask questions and your super-users can answer them. This eases the onboarding and empowers your super-users to do an important job
  6. Use the Google Docs or Dropbox integration: Slack has a million add-on tools. If you’re using Google Docs or Dropbox for shared files, integrate them into Slack. This allows you to see GDocs comments directly in slack, upload links to Dropbox files instead of the whole files, and a bunch of other magical things.
  7. Download the app: Slack is good on desktop but feels optimized for iPhone/Android. You definitely want both the desktop app and the phone app for the best experience.
  8. Be ready to ‘tether’ your laptop more: Slack doesn’t work offline. This is a bummer and the one major drawback. If, like me, you have a chunk of time each day when you’re offline but on your laptop (say, on a train), you’ll want some way to get online. I’ve been using the Personal Hotspot on my iPhone through AT&T nearly every day. It’s intermittent, but workable, you just need a cellphone plan with this option. Same thing goes for flights – you will want to pay for wifi more often.
  9. Use the ‘star’ ‘reminder’ ‘mark unread’ or ‘pin’ tools: the biggest adjustment I’ve had in Slack is the (bad) email habit of reading emails when I don’t have time to respond to them. I find it a bit harder to re-find things after I’ve read them in Slack, and am using the Star a lot to keep a running list of things that I have to go back to. I’m guessing that a combination of all four of these tools will work for me once I master them.
  10. Use Slack help: one of the best things about Slack, which is completely counter-intuitive if you’ve been living in Windows land, is that (nearly) every question you might has an easy-to-find answer. Start with the Slack Help Center and go from there.

All of this has made for a smooth transition to Slack, better communication, and time and energy freed up for the important stuff.

As a bonus, here’s the Masters of Scale podcast about Slack: The big pivot – Stewart Butterfield, Co-founder & CEO of Slack. It’s a good one.

Meaning it

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I just received johnson banks’ quarterly newsletter. This is the first paragraph:

Hello

This is the autumn edition of johnson banks did this, heavily skewed to a project that’s taken up most of our year so far. If our electronic epistle arrived by mistake, just unsubscribe and our apologies for the intrusion. Alternatively, if you enjoyed it, please feel free to forward it to others who might be interested or want to subscribe.

The message is: we actually care if you want to receive this note. If you do, that’s great. We are happy. And if you don’t, we care, because we’re not interested in bothering you.

It’s amazing how, more than 20 years after the “SPAM” was first used to refer to junk email, actually caring rather than just acting like you care is still all it takes to truly stand out.

Following up on my follow up

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I no longer try to reply immediately to every email. It’s not only impossible, it leaves me reactive, tired, and less productive (though very busy). I still try to be very responsive most of the time, and even this only works if I’m pithy while also being predictable and clear when it will take me longer to reply.

Everyone has their own approach to managing their communication flow, and part of the trick is to get my flow and someone else’s flow in sync. This boils down to is a series of pairings: my communication has a tone, a style, and a cadence; and, when a communication flow is working well, that evolves into a nice groove of clear mutual expectations (again, in terms of tone, style and cadence) with the people I’m in touch with regularly.

Where things get dicey is in higher stakes, infrequent communications – and these are the ones that we want to be getting right: reconnecting with a (potential) donor; reaching out to invite someone to speak at your conference; asking for advice from someone I don’t know.

The unspoken reality is that, in the absence of a strong existing relationship, the person doing the cold call (email) is taking advantage of the email medium to interrupt someone and borrow some of their attention. The only way this works is either by being exceptionally brief and clear in these sorts of notes (which seems to happen almost never), or by writing a note that itself adds value in exchange for that interruption (by being interesting or useful to the recipient, not to the sender).

Lately I’ve been noticing a lot of bad email etiquette that wrongly supposes that no one will notice or care about being interrupted and asked for something. This feels like the unintended consequence of an unstated but widely-followed norm that personal emails merit a personal reply, even when they don’t.  The result is more and more people asking for things without stopping to think about how to complete the circle of the ask they are making.

Hints that this is going wrong are phrases like: “I know we haven’t been in touch for a while, but…” “I realize I’m emailing out of the blue, but…” “Things got busy on my end, but I’d like to continue the conversation we started…” and, the worst, “You don’t know me but…” Essentially, any first sentence with a “but” in it is a problem.

(Even worse is any chain that contains any of the above phrases and is followed, one day later, by some version of “Hey, why haven’t you replied to my out of the blue email that I wrote on my timeline in the hopes of getting your attention?”)

Email can be quick and immediate, but relationships are not, and trust is earned or unearned each and every day. Don’t be confused by the medium (quick, easy, immediate) and the expectations of the people who are reading your notes.  The technology has evolved very quickly, but our expectations march to a different drummer.

15 ways you can reach me

~ Sasha ~ 9 Comments

Today a friend apologized to me for not seeing a Skype text I’d sent him last week (no problem). This got me thinking about the incoming communication tools that I have, all the ways people can reach me.

  1. Work email address (Outlook)
  2. Personal email address (Gmail)
  3. Blog email address (Gmail)
  4. Blog comments (WordPress)
  5. Spam/shopping email address (Yahoo)
  6. iPhone text
  7. WhatsApp (including a few groups)
  8. Twitter (DMs, RTs and mentions)
  9. Skype calls + texts [oh, and I’m testing Viber]
  10. Facebook (and I don’t use the messenger app)
  11. LinkedIn messages
  12. Work phone + voicemail
  13. Cellphone + voicemail
  14. Home phone + voicemail
  15. [Local cell phone while traveling abroad]

Fifteen different communications tools, and I’m not that active on any of the social media platforms. Nor does this make any reference to my going out and seeking news, updates and information (blog RSS feed, Twitter feed, Facebook feed, LinkedIn Feed, etc.).

This feels like an insane list. I guess Facebook and Google want to consolidate everything for me so I’m not jumping between platforms, but I don’t trust either enough to have that feel like a good solution.

Is this just the way it is, or am I missing something?

I’m curious: how many ways can you be reached?

(p.s. Eric Schmidt wrote a piece for Time about email, which includes the maxim “Clean out your inbox constantly.” I totally disagree. Where do we draw the line in terms of our incoming communications streams, and when are we supposed to do real thinking and work if we’re triaging 15 (20? 30?) feeds all day long?).

Word Economy

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Most emails are too long. And most emails, long or short, are either emotional deserts or they transmit the wrong emotional content.

Short is the only solution to email overload, and radical email shorthand is employed by nearly all the successful busy people I know. But it only works if you pick words that transmit feeling too.

One word shorthand for…

Friendly: Hey, hi, please, help, okay, great

Informal: yeah, yup, nah, sure, yo, …,

Aggressive: just (“it’s just that”), never mind, forget it

Dismissive: whatever (…you want), fine, c’mon

Connection: thank you, truly, warmly, visit (with), sorry

Encouraging: go for it!, absolutely, fabulous, super, yes!

“Just the facts” is a nice idea. But like it or not we’re communicating emotions, even in six words or less.

Threaded conversations

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

In my forever battle to beat back my (Outlook) Inbox, I’m in the middle of a tweak that I’m enjoying.

I switched over to show all conversations as “threaded” conversations. This is standard in Gmail and is the default on my iPhone but I’ve never done it in Outlook and had turned it off on my iPhone (it’s on again).

It’s taken some getting used to, but one week in I’m finding getting through my Inbox feels easier and faster, and overall it’s less work to keep track of things.

The way you do this on Outlook is under the “View” menu, click on “Show Conversations.” As a bonus click on “Show Messages from Other Folders” and then you’ll see your own sent replies as well as any filed messages (if you file into folders, which I don’t).

Show conversations_1

It takes some getting used to, especially because in Outlook there’s no “RE:” in the subject line, so everything feels like a new message. That’s confusing but otherwise I like it.

THE SAME SUBJECT LINE

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Every time you send an email you’re asking someone to make a decision.

Open this now or later.

Prioritize it or put in the “I’ll get to it later” pile.  (And later never comes.)

When you write your spouse, your best friend, your boss, you write a subject line that will help them understand why you are writing, help them understand how important the message is (or isn’t), help communicate something.  The subject line is the second thing they see when your email arrives (the first thing they see is that you sent it).

If it goes without saying that you would never, ever, send one person an email with the same subject line each and every time, how can it be that I still get newsletters whose subject is the name of the newsletter, conference invites whose subject is the name of the conference, offers from companies with the company name as the subject in big capital letters?

As in: NONPROFIT NEWSLETTER VOL 3

Or

SOLAR INDUSTRY CONFERENCE SPECTACULAR

Why oh why?

Just because you are writing something for an institution doesn’t mean you’re supposed to sound like an institution.  Please, sound like you.

 

Less ubiquity, please

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

My office is in the Google building so I’ve gotten to see lots of Google Glass beta testers riding up and down the elevators.  My bet is that Google Glass will be a product flop, but that it will be a bit like the space program – the product itself won’t sell much or be relevant to most people, but the underlying technology will probably have a huge impact on our lives.

This may be old fogey-ish of me but I don’t believe that it is just a generational question that keeps me from embracing the notion of ever-present, ever-available access to the web and email and apps with the tilt of my eyes.  Yes, I could imagine that at some not-so-distant date all glasses will come with a camera option (the head is a nice, steady way to take pictures) but I don’t buy the argument we need Google Glass because with it we at least won’t look down at our smartphones when we’re at a restaurant or in a large group.  What matters isn’t where our eyes go, what matters is where our attention lies.

And I suspect that over time we will have to re-teach our children the skill of sustained attention, the skill of having an empty moment and not doing anything with it, the skill of intense conversation and real listening.  Did you know that the average teen sends 3,000 texts a month?

In today’s world we all are continually experimenting with the lines between connection / productivity / responsiveness and distraction / rudeness.  Two colleagues of mine suggested the following four rules for managing incoming email and handheld devices, which I liked:

  1. Turn off desktop alerts of new emails coming in (the little box that pops up)  (in Outlook: File > Options > Mail > Message Arrival > Uncheck “Display a Desktop Alert”)
  2. No reading email before breakfast
  3. No reading email while in transit
  4. No phone or email in the bedroom

My own scorecard is as follows:

  1. I turned of desktop alerts for new emails about a month ago and I love it.
  2. I almost never read email before breakfast and when I do it’s a sign that I’m under a crazy deadline or stressed for some other reason.
  3. Hmmm.  I made a rule a couple of years ago not to look at my phone while in elevators, and I’ve stuck to that (it had become a reflex), but I spend enough time in transit that I don’t know that I can commit to this one.
  4. I do have my phone in the bedroom but I can honestly say it’s 95% as a time-piece and alarm

 

In reality these four rules are a really low bar.  Increasingly I think we will all be playing with the limits and rules that work for us, and everyone’s line will be different.  What makes me nervous is when I get reflexive about checking.  That sort of unconscious behavior feels unproductive.

 

I remember a year ago I was on a family vacation and my wife told me how proud she was of me, because one day on vacation I’d let my iPhone battery die.  That should not be seen as a major accomplishment.