Whats Irritating About E-mail - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Whats Irritating About E-mail - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career In recent years I’ve polled hundreds of people about their work in the digital age. Last week I wrote about what’s irritating to people about cellphones. This week, it’s what’s irritating about e-mail? When people: Give no greeting or sign-off Provide incomplete information Send messages that have typos and poor punctuation and sentence structures Put quotes or sayings in their signatures Expect a reply in five minutes Ask questions that can’t be answered in an e-mail and that require a phone call Sound cold or inhuman Write overly short, curt messages Send long e-mails or send long e-mail chains that I have to go back into to get context while they write, “What do you think?” Don’t reread their words to determine if the wrong unwritten message was sent Send e-mails with mixed topics Use subject lines that don’t reflect the e-mail’s content Repeatedly put in the subject line “Please read” or “Urgent” Don’t use the addressee’s name ?Forward e-mails without asking Don’t respond ?Send something important via e-mail that deserves a phone call instead Send an e-mail rather than having the courage to talk to me directly Type with bold, caps, wild fonts, or red text Sit close by but send an e-mail instead of getting up and stopping by my office to ask a question Give one-word answers to complicated e-mails Don’t bother to read the e-mail trail and respond blindly Send long e-mails without paragraphing Don’t include a phone number or any other optional contact information Lazily hit Reply all when individual, targeted responses are necessary Write in an emotional state Take a tone in written form they’d never take in person Write as if they were in an informal conversation instead of ?being engaged in business correspondence Use abbreviations and emoticons Now that you are reminded, refrain from doing the above!