The Email Charter: spread the word

Thanks to Elliot Jay Stocks for pointing out the Email Charter, an inspiring effort to draw up guidelines for email best practice.

It’s almost irresistible to go on a good solid rant here. When it comes to email, everyone has their pet peeves. But the Email Charter is a serious initiative, with the aim of bringing the swathes of time spent managing our inboxes under some kind of control.

I can sign up to the concept whole-heartedly, although I’d be interested to see how the finer points develop. For example, the second item:

Short or Slow is not Rude Let’s mutually agree to cut each other some slack. Given the email load we’re all facing, it’s OK if replies take a while coming and if they don’t give detailed responses to all your questions. No one wants to come over as brusque, so please don’t take it personally. We just want our lives back!

This combats the tendency some emailers have to fire off a long list of questions to which they expect an immediate and detailed reply, but it may also encourage its obverse, an equally bad habit. Too often I fire off a few short simple questions (“Where shall we meet? When?”) only to receive an answer to the one question most interesting/convenient the recipient (“My office?”). It’s maddening to have people pay so little attention to your messages, and it ultimately generates more email as the missing information must be queried again. Also, it’s a false economy: the recipient could’ve spent a fraction of the time wasted on multiple emails by simply doing a better job replying to the first one.

Allow me the luxury of adding a couple of extra peeves to the list.

1. Use a proper subject line. I regularly receive emails from people that are “replies” to an ancient and now irrelevant email I sent them weeks or months previously. (I suspect this is because many people don’t actually know they have address book functionality built into their email client, or consider it too much of a bother to use.) Subject lines should actually apply to the content of the email, or the ongoing thread. When the thread runs its course (in a timely and succinct fashion) it’s terminated. And when a new email or thread is started, use a proper, descriptive subject line that will make it easier to find the email later. So no “Hi!” or “This and that”, rather “Some suggestions for dinner” or “An agenda for the meeting”.

2. Don’t use email as a file system. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, how this one makes me angry. I should get out more, I know, but really, the world would be a better place if we got this sorted. I know a lot of people would disagree with me on this. After all, with the current push to cloud storage — which has been popularised for email for many years by Google — there is a big incentive to simply throw all your mail, files, media, whatever into a big bucket in the cloud (mixed metaphors, I know) and rely on sophisticated search to find the items you need. But I’m a believer in retaining (at least some of) the now quaint tradition of an organised file structure. The reasons are many and too complex to go into here, but as regards email the practical upshot of this chuck-it-in-a-bucket approach is that people simply lose things. Constantly. (If I had a pound for every time I heard “Could you email me that again? I can’t seem to find the one you sent …”) If you need to keep important messages and attachments, save them to your hard disk (or Dropbox-style cloud storage drive) in a suitably named folder/directory. At the very least, use a folder-based system in your email client and move messages out of your inbox and into the appropriate folder as soon as you’ve acted on them.

Okay, that feels better. It’s good to get that lot off my chest.