The Bottom Line Vine » email http://bottomlinevine.com You heard it through the Bottom Line Vine Thu, 20 May 2010 17:45:29 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Email Like Your Are Texting with EOM http://bottomlinevine.com/2008/10/email-like-your-are-texting-with-eom/ http://bottomlinevine.com/2008/10/email-like-your-are-texting-with-eom/#comments Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:49:27 +0000 bottomline http://bottomlinevine.com/?p=92

I got an email from my girlfriend today with the subject line: “What time are you getting home EOM”

I was a little curious about whether this EOM was a typo or a new nickname she’s given me, and when I clicked into the message there was nothing in the body.

I emailed her back and asked “What’s with the EOM” and she responded “It means End of Message.  It’s a way to save time by letting you know there’s no body to the msg, just that quick question,” and sent this link.  I responded, “Well it didn’t work that well did it because we’ve emailed each other 4 times now and you still don’t know what time I’m getting home ; )”

I didn’t get  a response to that, so clearly she was not amused, but despite my response,  I think this is a great idea… providing people know what it means.  I am actually going to try and get everyone here at VizQuest on board with this convention.  I think it’s great for a few reasons:

  1. It saves time for quick messages not to have to click into the message, particularly when I’m checking my email on my Treo.
  2. It forces people to be concise.  The only thing that annoys me more than an a rambling email is when people leave a voice mail message saying “call me back.”  If that’s all you had to say you could have sent a page or a text and saved me the time of dialing into my voice mail… but that’s a topic for another post.
  3. It guarantee’s people will read it.  When I’m short on time I’ll just scan through the subject lines looking for something important, but with an EOM message, important or not, I get the whole message and I breeze through.

EOM

]]> http://bottomlinevine.com/2008/10/email-like-your-are-texting-with-eom/feed/ 0 Taking Control of Your Email Inbox http://bottomlinevine.com/2008/09/taking-control-of-your-email-inbox/ http://bottomlinevine.com/2008/09/taking-control-of-your-email-inbox/#comments Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:50:38 +0000 bottomline http://bottomlinevine.com/?p=37

I get hundreds of emails every day, yet I am able to effectively and efficiently deal with them in 30-60 minutes a day. This wasn’t always the case. My inbox used to be an unmanageable mess that wasted hours of my time and consequently cost the company money. I was able to regain control of the inbox monster with some principles I learned from Getting Things Done. Here are a 3 things you can do to take control of your inbox…

1.  Limit your inbox visits. For some of us, the compulsion to open our inbox just to check it is as strong as a nicotine crave, and can prove to be cancerous to our productivity. Frequent inbox visits break your work flow and the frequent transitions unnecessarily lengthen the time it takes to get anything done. Instead of succumbing to the email urges, discipline yourself to open your inbox 3 times a day. For example, try once in the morning, once mid-day and once at the end of the day.

2.  Don’t check your email, process your email. Each time you open your inbox process each message. For every message you have several options…

  1. Delete it – I put this first because this action more often than not is forgotten. This should be your default. If you’re not sure if you’ll need it later, it’s not that important, DELETE IT!
  2. Save it – only do this when you know you’ll need it later, and only save it in an archive folder, not in your inbox.
  3. Do it now – if the email requires action that you can do in 2 or 3 minutes (or less), do it now.
  4. Put on the To Do List – if the email requires action that will take more than a few minutes put it on the to-do list. Be careful not to trade a cluttered inbox for a cluttered to-do list. The To Do list is for important actionable items, not for email messages you don’t feel like reading now.
  5. Reply/Forward – Don’t waste your time or your recipient’s time with long drawn out emails, make every email meaningful and concise. Try using the 5 Sentence technique, which means keeping all email responses to 5 sentences or less.

For 3, 4 and 5 make sure you follow up and delete or save it. Don’t leave anything in your inbox.

3.  Save some time by filtering emails the end up in the same place every time. I get a number of notifications and reports emailed to me that I need to save for records but don’t need to read. For example, payment receipts for online purchases, Paypal and banking transaction notifications. For these I have set up rules in outlook (or you can use filters in most webmail services) that automatically send these messages to my archive folders.

I think you’ll find that if you follow these three practices you’ll find yourself reclaiming some sanity, and have more time to spend developing your business and improving your bottom line.

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