Communicating Effectively: May 2006 Archives

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.