How many mistakes per week do you make when you send email? One? Ten? Every time?
Watch this video to learn a little trick to cut down on email mistakes. It will help save you a LOT of wasted time.
Please share: What is the biggest mistake you’ve ever made when sending email?
Raw Transcript:
Now if you’re trying to break the habit of multitasking, a lot of the time you’re going to make these mistakes with email because you’re jumping around between lots of different tasks. And here is a quick little tip that you can implement to help you avoid common mistakes with email. And the tip is count to ten before you send. Count to ten before you send. So let’s say that I’ve typed-up an email and I have a little funny example email here. Before I hit that send button I want to count to ten. Now I’m going to walk you through this and this is going to take a little bit longer than ten seconds but you’re going to get the idea of how quickly you can correct mistakes with ten seconds of thinking time. So I start at the top and work my way down at the bottom. I make sure that I’m sending it to the right peer or person. I want to make sure that I don’t have wrong people. A common mistake is that people get reply to all and they end up sending it at lots people who don’t need it. So I want to make sure that I deleted those people. I also want to make sure that if I’m sending an email to a lot of different people, that I’ve put them into the blind carbon copy to make sure their identities are safe. If you have multiple email accounts, you can click on the account button and make sure that you’re sending from the right account. Then you’re going to check the subject line. Make sure you have a subject line. That’s a really bad email, full of thoughts and not sends a subject line. You want people to know what it is that you’re talking about. Then I’m going to move on to the body. Of course I’m going check to make sure quickly there are no typos. I also if there are time zones involve, let say that I was setting up appointments I go “Oh no, that’s not really Pacific that’s Eastern”. So I want to take a moment make sure that the time zones are correct. Make sure that you know, my signature looks professional and friendly. And you can even make sure that you are using the proper signature. If you’re using different email accounts, sometimes you may want to have different signatures. So I can go through all of that in just ten seconds. And I will avoid a lot of mistakes a lot backtracking that comes from sending email out too quickly.