Email Skimming

May 6, 2009 by Jerry 

email_skimming

In a prior post I wrote, “email has instilled a drastic decline in the verbiage (as well as the style, spelling, punctuation and courtesy—but those are subjects for another time).” This is the time to focus on the last item, courtesy.

See if this scenario doesn’t sound familiar: You are deeply involved in the development of a major business project, and you write an email to a key member of the working group in which you raise several issues that need to be addressed. The person to whom you wrote responds to your email—but answers only the first of the issues you raised.

That person is guilty of email skimming: replying to only one item, usually the one on the top line.

What happens next? You have to write another email requesting responses to the other matters in your original email—a waste of time and duplication of your effort—or those other issues are delayed. Either option is thoroughly unproductive.

What do you do?

My solution is to write multiple emails to repeat offenders of email skimming in which each email is limited to only one item. This approach has produced an increase in the efficiency of issue resolution but, sadly, an accompanying increase of the inefficiency of my time management.

Does anyone have other solutions to email skimming?

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One Response to “Email Skimming”

  1. Olivier on May 6th, 2009 5:07 pm

    Although not 100% fool proof, what I’m doing when I have several questions like this is to:
    - indicate from the outset of the email that I have “n” questions
    - number all of them

    It’s much harder for someone to pretend they did not see the other questions, if they answer a 1) but not 2) and 3).

    Overall, the approach that Sally Mc Ghee offers in her book “Take Back Your Life” (http://www.amazon.com/Take-Back-Your-Life-Microsoft/dp/0735623430/ref=pd_sim_b_2) is pretty effective. In a nutshell:
    - specify “action requested” (or “reply requesed”) in the title.. repeating it before the actual action also helps.
    - be succinct
    - use bullet points (or in my case numbers) when possible to communicate asks

    To this, especially if several people are asked for input, and not all on the same, I start each point with the name of the people in bold red, then the action.

    So, as I don’t have red here, we assume CAPITAL LETTERS = red bold it would look like:

    Action requested:
    1) JOHN, MANOJ: Please send your new plan by end-of-day the 25th.
    2) JOHN, JULIA: Fill up the spreadsheet by end of month
    3) ALL: Ensure all your expense reports are in before end of week.

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