Posts Tagged 'etiquette'

How to Respond to a Ringing Phone in a Meeting

Posted on May 31st, 2019 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I once talked to a manager who shared this story: she’d been interviewing a young hiring candidate when his phone went off. He answered it, and it was his wife who wanted to wish him success at the interview. She told me she’d felt it was immature of him to pick up the call, though luckily for him she did not hold this against him when she made her decision. But this story made me think: did the young man do anything wrong? Or was it the right thing to do? Pros: By answering the call, he was showing respect.. Read more

BLUF! A Great Method to Get Your Message Across

Posted on March 30th, 2017 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

BLUF: Put the main takeaway – the bottom line – of your message at its very beginning.   BLUF? What on Earth is that? BLUF stands for “Bottom Line Up Front”. It is a term coined, apparently, in the US Army, and it denotes a model for effective message writing. The idea is to reverse the usual method, where you first present your case, your arguments and justifications, and then – at the end – draw the conclusions or decisions. Instead you put the conclusion, the main thing you need the reader to understand, at the very beginning of the.. Read more

The Legitimacy – or Otherwise – of Ultra-brief Emails

Posted on April 18th, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

A devious solution to email overload A friend pointed me to a post  that offered a simple and highly unusual solution to email overload: change the signature block on your desktop email client to read “Sent from my iPhone”. The idea, the writer explained, is that this will make you “feel more comfortable offering short, direct, and concise replies to incoming emails, thus improving your email productivity and freeing up time to do other more important work”. This is certainly devious, is probably effective, and the logic seems unassailable… but it raises a question: why would you need it? Surely.. Read more

Reduce Information Overload Using Brilliant Email Etiquette

Posted on January 10th, 2013 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Guest Post by Dr Monica Seeley Information overload and its sibling email overload continue to plague most business users.  Indeed although the latest figures for sick leave have been falling, the incidences of stress related illness have risen. Information overload and email overload are major contributors to stress related illness.   Our brains just cannot cope with the volume of information being  pushed at us, through email and now social technologies.  It has been suggested that we are now bombarded through these channels with the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day! In the case of email, a major problem is actually.. Read more

How You Can Stop the Abuse of Reply to All

Posted on August 14th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

Reply to All: probably the most hated feature of Email. How do I know? Because whenever I work with clients to reduce Email Overload, one request pops up right at the beginning: Can we put a stop to the abuse of Reply All? Yes, you can. But before I talk about solutions, let’s consider why anyone would misuse Reply to All in the first place, if they hate it so? Part of the problem, and the reason the feature is retained, is that it is really about enabling two very different functions: Conversation: When communicating within  a small team, it.. Read more