Email Composition Tips
There are two specific things that I do when I send emails and I’d like to share them for the benefit of you who might feel overwhelmed by information overload.
- Change the order of composition
- Delay sending your message for X-minutes
Change the order of composition
I was tipped to this by a great article over at EveryJoe.com. Basically, you need to change the order in which you write the parts of your email. The guts of the recommendation follows:
- Attach files – how many times have you sent an email and forgotten to attach the files? Attaching the files first also reinforces the purpose of the email which will be important in the following steps.
- Write Body – The body of the message in this case with attached files should be a simple statement of what action you would like the recipient to take on the attached files. Should they review them, are they to be printed for the upcoming seminar? State specifically what you want the reader to do in your email.
- Write Subject – Write the subject after the body because it should be a simple, stripped-down restatement of the body of the message. Clear and concise with key words at the beginning of the subject.
- Select Recipients – Choosing the recipients last performs a couple of helpful functions. First, if an email doesn’t have a recipient specified, you can’t accidentally send the email without the attachments or pausing long enough to make sure you actually want to hit “Send” on that email laced with your frustrations. Secondly, if you wait till the end you can further clarify exactly who needs to be included based on the actions and requested tasks specified in the email.
Delay sending your message for X-minutes
I’ve had a lot of “Oh Crap!” moments over the years. You probably know what I’m talking about: You hit the send button and then immediately regret it because you forgot an attachment or some other important element in the body text. This is resolved by instructing Outlook to wait X number of minutes before sending after you have already clicked the Send Button.
A quick search online nets a number of results for setting this up. So if the following doesn’t work with your version of Outlook, you may want to perform a google search to determine the best way to do it. I found what follows here.
- Open Outlook.
- Click on TOOLS, Rules & Alerts.
- Click on New Rule “Start from a blank rule”.
- Click in Step 1 box, “Check message after sending”.
- Next, click on “On this machine only”.
- Next, Click in Step 1 box, “Defer delivery by a number of minutes”.
- Click in Step 2 box, “a number of” enter the number of minutes (usually 1).
- Click on OK, click on Finish.
That’s it! With these two tools you should find a few common email composition annoyances addressed to some degree. There are various Outlook add-ons for those of you that want further control. But, in the mean time, these are two that you shouldn’t go without.
