By Dana P Skopal, PhD
Emails are now a part of life, but work emails can leave us feeling like we are drowning. How do you start to read and reply to emails after a long weekend or vacation?
Focus: A work email is to convey information and often requests some response. To engage a reader and get a response to the email, a writer should not waffle or tell a long story. For example, if there is a deadline looming, a writer should convey that in the subject line. A clear action statement in the subject line can make a reader take notice, rather than generic wording such as ‘response required’.
Fact of life: When you open your inbox on the first day back after a holiday, what do you face?
My colleague had six weeks off over summer. The first day back required an untold mental strength that was indeed masked by unspoken frustration. His work inbox showed he had over 1,300 emails waiting to be read (even with Out of Office Auto Reply). So did he read them all?
First, how long would it take to read say 1,300 emails? If each email contains 100 words, that’s 130,000 words – not including any attachments. If you are focused, you may be able to click on an email and read 200 words per minute. That makes it 12,000 words in one hour, or opening 120 emails. If you can concentrate at that pace, it would take nearly 11 hours to read all the 1,300 emails. And that is without taking a toilet or coffee break, or opening and reading the attachments. If you work an eight hour day, that’s almost one and a half days of just looking at emails – and not even responding to them.
Secondly, when a person has so much to read, what do they do? Do they apply a range of reading strategies? Most people would skim the subject line and make a series of quick decisions. The options are to skip the email, read the first paragraph, or, if still interested, then maybe skim-read the full message. A reader would engage with the full email message if the topic was important and clearly presented.
My colleague did not read all his emails. He used reading strategies of skimming and made numerous decisions about which emails were important. This reading and decision-making process still took well over a day. Fortunately, another colleague had monitored the emails during his vacation and followed up on issues when necessary, which made good business sense. But the work inbox still remains an ongoing challenge, particularly for managers who can receive hundreds of emails daily.
In our email-life a reader makes many decisions about what to read and how much to read. So as email writers, it is surely our responsibility to write clearly and succinctly to make the email-work-life less stressful and more efficient.
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