The Five Sentence Email

When you send email, you most definitely want it to be read! With everyone’s inboxes bulging at the seams with unwanted come-ons you face an awful lot of competition in your recipient’s inbox for their attention. Getting read is no small feat,  getting your reader to take action even a greater accomplishment. Lets face it – E-mail that takes too long to respond to results in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.

Good writers know that lean, vibrant language is almost always preferable to verbose, rambling writing. There is virtually no writing in the world so good that it can’t be made better by making it shorter. There are exceptions, of course – a contract needs to cover every possible potentiality, as does the text of an international treaty, but these documents are not really meant to be read, they’re meant to be enacted.  

Writing concisely offers benefits on its own – the short email, particularly the email whose contents fit into the preview pane without any scrolling, has a much higher chance of gaining a reader’s attention than one that starts off with three pages about trivia.

This is what Mike Davidson (five.sentenc.es) figured out – if his recipients were half as slammed as he was, he figured they could use some relief from long-winded emails that ramble on and on in the guise of pleasantries. Instead, he committed himself to writing emails that were five sentences or less, every single time.

That’s all well and good, of course, but how can you make sure you say what you need to say if you limit yourself to five sentences?  You don’t want to leave anything out, right? Fortunately, super-entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki offered this advice - ”whether UR young or old, the point is that the optimal length of an email message is five sentences. All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.

A good outline for a five-sentence email might look something like this:

1. Who are you?  – This might be skipped if you already have a relationship with the recipient; otherwise, in as little space as possible, explain the relevant facts about yourself.
2. What do you want? – Explain why you’re writing the email, what you expect your recipient to do about it, and any relevant information they need to respond with the appropriate action.
3. Why should you get it? -  Why should they bother? Explain why your request is important, and if relevant, what’s in it for them.
4. When do you need them to act? Open-ended requests get responded to whenever the recipient gets around to it. Be as specific as possible, so that your recipient a) has a sense of urgency, b) feels that their response is important to you, and c) feels inspired to act.

If more information is needed, a formal report, a webpage, or some other document is probably going to be better-suited rather than presenting it than an email. Send an attachment, send a link, or schedule a face-to-face meeting if necessary; don’t blast off a giant email that takes you hours to write in the vain hope that it will be read. It probably won’t!

This material was summarized from Mastering the Short Email by Dustin Wax.

 - Steve (www.SPMsolutions.NET)

Two Simple Time-Management Tips

 

If you are trying to recover some of those lost hours each day and don’t really want to ’spend time’ to ’save time’ you should probably concentrate on two simple things – your e-mail inbox and daily to-do list.

 

The biggest email time-saver ever invented was Outlooks E-mail Rules. Simply add two new folders under your main inbox. Call the first one something like ‘Top-Priority’ and the other ‘Non-Critical’. Your goal is to get your important e-mails out of your general purpose inbox and into the Top-Priority folder which you will read and respond to each morning. The Non-Critical folder will include e-mails that will simply have to wait and may only get scanned once per week. Some may never get opened. That leaves your main inbox folder for all the things you are not sure about or haven’t categorized yet. Every morning use Email Rules to categorize new inbox e-mails that should be Top-Priority (using either the subject or sender address). Over time you’ll eventually get all the important ones swept into the Top-Priority folder where you can read and respond quickly. Your goal is to guarantee getting thru the Top-Priority folder each morning and then do a quick scan of new items in your inbox. Then as you have time, categorize the obvious low-priority e-mails as Non-Critical or even better as junk mail.

 

For more information visit Microsofts Tips for Outlook site.

 

The other very simple time-management saver is from Brian Tracy’s book ‘Eat That Frog’ and is called the ABCDE Method. Each morning you simply write down everything you have to do. Then go thru each one and categorize it as an A if you (yourself) must do it now, B if it is a task you should do, C if it would be nice to do, D if it should be delegated, and E tasks should probably be eliminated. Remember – there will never be enough time to do all the things you need to do so it’s critically important that you take action and work on the most important tasks first and resist the urge to procrastinate (or even worse) spending time on the easy tasks before starting the important ones.

For more information visit the Time Management Guide.com.

Usually it’s the simple ideas like these that can have the biggest impact on people, so give them a try!

- Steve  (www.SPMsolutions.NET)

 

Extended DISC Behavior Assessment

 

To be an effective leader and/or manager of others you need to know yourself, control yourself, know others, and meet their needs. Extended DISC is a simple online assessment which measures your natural behavior styles when interacting with others. It provides you with valuable, easy-to-use insight into how you can more effectively work with others who may or may not interact with people like you do.   

For those of you who have been around awhile you may remember the older Myers-Briggs testing or the Merrill-Reid tests (Analytical-Amiable-Driver-Expressive styles). These were all very popular in the 90’s but have now been replaced by testing that is more accurate and easier to interpret. Extended DISC is a very popular online assessment which is simple to take (only about 15 minuts online), easy to interpret, and straight forward to use in everyday business situations.

 

Extended DISC is a four-quadrant behavior model based on two items. The first is how you gather information. Some people are more intuitive while others require specific data. The second item is how you make decisions. Some people base decisions solely on what the facts tell them to do while others are more concerned with the impact on others. The combination of these traits, when put on a four-quadrant model, yields four basic behavior types.

  

   D-style people – dominant, decisive, competitive and demanding

   I-style people –  interactive, social, talkative, enthusiastic, persuasive

   S-style people – steady, calm, careful, modest

   C-style people – compliant, precise, logical, careful, disciplined

 

One of the reasons that the Extended DISC evaluations have been so popular is because they are simple to understand and also basic enough that you can quickly recognize other people’s styles. This is an invaluable tool for leaders, managers, and salespeople whose business success depends on reading other people and interacting with them appropriately. 

 

Click here for more information.             

 

- Steve  (SPM Business Solutions)