How to Get Better at Email in 2020
The new year is coming, and if you’re still dealing with an inbox filled with emails from 2019, here are three tips to help you improve your email in 2020.
First, take any email with more than three sentences and see if you can make it shorter. As Lifehacker’s Nick Douglas explains in his post on How To Write The Perfect Email:
Review your post and remove all self-references, assumptions, and redundancies. Again, it is not a problem that you wrote all this. The only problem is that you won’t edit it. It is similar to another basic editing tool: delete the first paragraph you probably spent warming up. Delete the last paragraph that is repeated or out of bounds. Save your readers’ time and energy.
After getting rid of all these self-references and guesswork, check to see if any of the phrases in your email can be replaced with clearer and stronger alternatives. For inspiration, use Dani Donovan’s printed email like a boss infographic — for example, instead of saying “sorry for the delay,” you could write “thank you for your patience.”
Donovan, a comic book artist whose work focuses on ADHD, created the guide as a way to help herself and others:
I have a bad habit of overusing exclamation marks, emoticons, and clarifying words like “just” and “maybe” to make them sound very friendly and non-threatening in emails. (“Just wondering / just confirming / just checking / just checking / just wanted to let you know”)
Donovan’s other email tip is to stop working hard on email drafts and turn those long, revised emails into real conversations (preferably before you spend an hour revising them again). While we all know that some emails must remain electronic in order for you to keep track of communications, there is also the benefit of what Nick Douglas calls the “three-minute rule”:
If you’re having trouble writing and replying to emails, here’s a simple trick: set a timer for three minutes. Now write this whole letter before the time is up.
Again, this won’t work in all cases, but it should help you clean up a lot of what’s in your inbox.
So. Three minutes, three sentences and as little doubt as possible. Use these three tips to improve your 2020 email and quickly respond to all the messages you accumulate in the time it took you to read this article.