Naiman Labs Newsletter #37. Giving email a chance.

This is very “popular” now to hate e-mails.

People give tons and tons of reasons why do they hate e-mails. And even though there are some real rational reasons mentioned, I personally think that this is mostly because e-mails feel outdated. E-mail is old. It is an old practice from an old corporate world, it has kind of bad reputation and therefore it feels too formal.

One of the team members I work with has asked me lately: “Vlad, why do we even still use e-mails at all? I don’t read them and I believe most of the people don’t read them”.

So, why do we still use this seemingly old-fashioned communication tool? Is it that bad by the way?

Another issue is that we often use emails inefficiently. We simply don’t write them well and e-mails turn out to be a mess. When you receive an e-mail without a clear subject title, poorly written, poorly structured, no signature (here I am saying hello to my former university research supervisor - he wrote the worst e-mails ever) of course it will be a mess. But there’s something about it.

Why do we even use e-mails?

Let me share why I personally find e-mails very good source of communication.

1️⃣ E-mails are not like chats; they force people to formulate and articulate their thoughts. You need to be quite precise, structured and you need to make sure it’s easy to read.

2️⃣ E-mails are quite transparent. You can include all the important people in the e-mail thread and they will get all the context. E-mails can form a clean and clear thread. You can always see the history. In the clean thread you will get a pretty solid breadcrumb where you can find and track all the agreements and disagreements. It is much easier than in regular messengers conversations.

3️⃣ E-mails do not require your immediate attention by default. Unlike in Slack, phone calls, or other messengers nobody expects you to respond an e-mail immediately. It is easier for you to manage your on time and consciously prioritise when you want to work with your e-mails.

4️⃣ You can manage your e-mails. You can organise e-mails in folders, you can schedule them, snooze them, filter them, label them etc. Even in the basic Gmail and MS Outlook apps there are plenty of features that can help you manage e-mails well enough and organise your own efficient e-mail management process.

Why bother?

So can we do something about e-mails to make them better in 2023? Should we even bother about it? Should we bother about the e-mails at all? Short answer is “yes”.

This is not only about the e-mail itself, but about the written communication in general. Think about it. Written communication is the easiest way to give the clear information that will stay with your recipient for a long time. It is your chance to write a clean, clear message, showcase your communication as well as your structure thinking skills.

What can we do to write the better e-mails, hate them less and actually like them instead?

✍️ Set the clean, actionable subject titles. Make sure that you include call-to-action.

If it is an e-mail that is just and information sharing, you can include [For your information] in the title. If it requires action, you can put [Action required]. If this e-mail requires a certain decision from the stakeholders, feel free to add [Decision needed]. You can also include some context in the title. If you want someone to complete the survey attached in the e-mail, you can add “[Action required, 5 minute survey]: complete the survey until 20th of December”. Just a single line provides much more context for your readers.

🧵 Use the same single e-mail thread for the same topic.

I find very annoying when people create separate e-mail threads for the same topic. They just don’t think about the recipients. New e-mail - new subject line. Even if the topic remains the same. But if you think from the recipient point of view, it’s better to keep all the history in the same thread. You will keep the context in the single space.

🤝 Explain why do you add/remove certain recipients.

You will provide them context again and you’ll proactively answer “why am I here” question. before the main text of your e-mail you can simply add “+John to provide us info on his project”.

📁 Always structure your e-mails properly.

For the big e-mails I always add some subheadings like: “context”, “action required”, “problem to solve”. Another example is if it is a process update for example then I always add “Before” and “After” subheadings. Also do not hesitate to highlight the main point of your e-mail so recipients can easily understand what it is about.

ProTip: Sometimes it is even better to include the main point at the very top of your e-mail and add the context after. But that depends on the e-mail type and the recipients you work with. Putting the main point to the top especially important of your recipients are the executives or senior stakeholders, you generally want to save their time.

💅 Formatting.

I don’t know about you, but for me it is always much easier to read the clean formatted text, rather then a messy one. In consulting times we dedicated a lot of time for cleaning the documents. Simply because the clan well-written document creates better impression and shows that a lot of efforts and thoughts were given to this document.

Don’t be cheap on the formatting:

• Clean the wordings, you don’t want to have the typos

• Insert hyperlinks in the text instead of long impossible to read URLs.

• Use subheadings and text formatting

⚙️ "Change the default setting to 'reply' instead of 'reply-to-all'.”

Based on my experience a lot of people just reply-to-all by default and they often clog the recipients’ inboxes unnecessary.

Anything else?

Yes, there are some more pro-tips for e-mails in 2023 😊

📱 Try different apps to find the one you actually enjoy working with.

There are multiple e-mail apps on the market today. There’s no need for you to stick to the MS Outlook, or Gmail by default. Even though Gmail is pretty good in my opinion. For example I recommend trying Spark, or Superhuman. Both are great apps that can really speed you up especially when you have several e-mail accounts to manage. They also have AI-features that can help you clean the text, summarise it and do much more.

📁 🏷️ 🔭 Apply folders, filters and labels.

My biggest mistake in the e-mail management was keeping everything in my inbox. I simply thought that if I have it all in inbox than I can use the search function and find it when I need it. Now I find it much easier to use different folders, labels and filters to clean up the inbox and apply “inbox-zero” approach.

For example I send all the e-mail notifications (for example bills, statements, or some updates) to a silent folder with a creative name “Bills&Statements” and I will see them only when I need it.

You can try some of these ideas in your e-mail process and you will see that it will make your life easier and you won’t hate the e-mails anymore 😊

Feel free to use these tips for your personal e-mail process, or apply some of these in your company to make your written communications better.

Do you want to know more about the e-mail management, try these videos, that inspired me:

•  ”E-mail etiquette tips”

• “Zero-inbox”

• “5 steps to inbox-zero”

See you next week!

Vlad from Naiman Labs