Do you get e mails?

I bet you do, we all do?

Are they a problem for you?

Well I bet like the millions and millions of people on the internet these days you probably get "too much" e mail.

Lots of that might be SPAM and we can do something about that with SPAM filters and filtering devices (Google Mail is excellent for only letting you receive genuine e mails).

So even if you have dealt with the dross that bothers everyone, you still have to deal with those real pieces of correspondence that require your attention.

In the work I do helping professional people become more effective so they can release more time for the more important things in their life dealing with e mail is one of the biggest challenges they face.

Certainly in large organisations where the tendency to copy EVERYONE on e mails creates this unnecessary flow of electrons that clogs up in boxes throughout the company, e mail volume is a problem.

Even if you could reduce the CC problem, a big challenge is the way e mails are written.

Long meandering paragraphs, too much information, not getting to the point and a myriad of other poor communication habit mean not only do we have to read this stuff, we also have to decipher it.

Perhaps there should be an "Email writing course".

One of the things on that course would be the layout of the text.

I subscribe to quite a few e mail lists for a variety of different reasons - personal and professional.

Some are better than others for their content but one that stands out not only for its content (subject is irrelevant here) but for te way it is laid out so that it is much easier to read.

Here are just a few lines from a recent e mail I got from a marketing expert called Tellman Knudson:

I was at this party…

Fantastic spread of food,
good music, awesome company…

but one thing stood out-

and since then I've checked
in with my friends who
threw the party-

It's the most refreshing
thing I've ever tasted.

The thing I like about how this is written is that the text is just a few words wide allowing us to simply run our eyes down the page to take in the writing.

I also like the gaps between the ideas so it makes it very easy to read.

This is chunking in its purest form and means the reader can scan through this very quickly and get the meaning from it.

I am convinced if more people write their e mails like this, they would be far easier (and therefore far quicker) to read.

So the next time you write an e mail why not try doing it like this…

Let me know how you get on.