Recently in Communicating Effectively Category

OK, the "evil" part of the title here is really just to get your attention - it's the second part that's the real problem: attachments are over-used.

And over-used attachments? Those are evil.

How are they evil?

Let me count the ways.

As I've discussed before, email is not urgent. Really.

And yet we persist in treating as such.

Add to that the experience of getting an email on a topic you feel passionately about, and it's a recipe for a communications disaster.

I'm sure we've all been there. You're on a mailing list or in some kind of on-line discussion and someone says something that, to you, is outrageous - literally provoking outrage. You then experience an urge, a desire, a need, to respond, to respond before anyone else does, and to respond strongly to put that person in their place. Perhaps you want to point out the error of their ways and their thinking, and then perhaps move on to topics such as their parentage and personal hygiene.

And that's when all hell breaks loose.

There's a good chance I'm going to get branded as a techie-luddite (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one) for the recommendation I'm about to make.

I believe that 90% of your outgoing email should be in plain text format. Maybe more.

Why?

Aside from a collection of technical reasons I'll get to in a minute, it's simple really: you want people to focus on what you have to say, not how it looks. Lots of formatting, backgrounds, highlighting and using many different fonts and styles are all things that distract from your words. They're more about making your message "pretty" to look at, and rarely add value to your ideas.

I'm not saying never use HTML (or Rich Text) email, but I am saying default to using plain text and only use HTML email when you really need to, which is actually pretty rare.

When faced with a flood of email in your inbox, how do you decide what's worth looking at? What are the criteria you use to decide where to spend your valuable time?

I don't know about you, but I actually look at the Subject field first. Often before I even look at who the email is from.

Now, I can almost hear many of you already saying "Yeah, subject line, big deal. Whatever. It's not that important."

You are so wrong.

My guess is that even you look at the subject of the message (before or after seeing who it's from) before you do anything. I'll bet you immediately look at anything that sounds important, on-topic or relevant to your situation, and skip the rest - either for later, or for "when I get around to it", which is really just another way of saying "never".

Now imagine you're trying to get your email read by someone who's incredibly busy, and suffering form email overload because they haven't been reading Taming Email. What are they going to pay attention to first? The email whose subject line tells them clearly what the message is about.

It only makes sense.