Tag Archives: Productivity

Email: Don’t Get Fired!

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Have you ever received an email that was sent to you unintentionally?  Or seen one where you know someone was copied, but most definitely should have been.  Or better yet, received an email followed quickly by a recall notice?  I am most definitely not letting you recall the first message.  I will be reading every word of it.

So, here’s another quick email tip.

You can read about the last one here: Don’t Fire & Forget.

I refer to this as my “Don’t Get Fired Rule.”  I’ve only met one other person who does something like this, but everyone should.

I put a two minute delay on all outbound emails.

That’s it. Super simple.

It gives you an extra two minutes to think about what you wrote.

It gives you a chance to correct that recipient you fat fingered. (I purposely don’t autofill addresses – maybe another post).

It slows you down just enough, to slow you down just enough.

For bonus points, you can set the rule so emails sent with “high importance” bypass the delay.  So if you are in a meeting and need to send something quickly and folks are waiting on you, just send it high importance. An enhancement idea that I borrowed liberally (i.e., stole) from the other person I referenced above.

Hope that helps.

Email: Don’t Fire & Forget

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I don’t like to be heavily managed.  And therefore, I try not to heavily manage others.

However, I realized that I had a bit of blind spot in trusting folks to follow through on their commitments.  I would send an email requesting an update or a response to a question.  But never receive a response.  And, I wouldn’t realize that for some time.  And, I didn’t have a good process to track these.

So, here’s what I found works for me.

  1. Create a folder called Follow-up.
  1. Create an Outlook rule that moves any message from me to the Follow-up folder.
  1. BCC myself on emails that I want to make sure I get a response on.
  2. Check the Follow-up folder as part of my weekly planning routine.