Quick Fire Work Email Advice

This post is from a comment made to Paul Lewis on LinkedIn and I thought I would share and expand slightly here:

1. Superhuman (the email app) found speed was the most critical part of email (as a comms channel), the speed of access and response is how they reshaped their company - if the most important comms is on email in your business treat it as such and have check-ins.

2. Emails should have a limit of x replies or y responses, threads aren’t ever useful apart from for compliance reasons. Once you hit that agreed-upon number remove email and replace with a phone call (for a quick-fire solution) or a working document - a working document is far better at centralising and can update & distribute far more effectively (and can prevent forwards etc) and become a training material.

3. Never EVER combine email and Slack or Teams!
   Going from structured to unstructured and combining will only drive you and colleagues crazy.

4. Have a working system, urgent / non-urgent (comes commonly highly recommended from exec coaches), or a filing system (use tags in Google Mail or their folder system or use folders in Outlook) which helps you keep on top of emails or helps you understand how to rank and prioritise.

5. Learn the tools quickly and remove notifications for every reply and responses

6. Use better email tools, industry leaders like Gmail, Outlook etc are good at filtering (into primary inboxes etc), however, these tools bad at letting you understand the importance of responder etc - apps like Spark and a few others are getting smarter with replies with notifications and speed of replies

7. Something to keep in mind with email, email is a flow of requests & FYIs, so email is only convenient to the sender and rarely ever to the receiver.
   If you are sending these types of emails help the receiver understand what is the most important emails by using flags, better subject titles and intros

8. Use BLUF (bottom line up front) - this is borrowed by the army, helping people understand what the most important element of the email is and going into more detail(s)

9. Create rules with the company to use labels, something we used agency side and I brought with me in most places are pre-determined rules [FYI] [Action Required] [Business Critical] etc.

Below is a great example of how designing a new product/app is far more than just doing it the same as others ↓