Email Curmudgeon, Part III: 5 Things That Bug Me
Davis
Longtime readers of this column know that, on occasion, I can get a little grumpy when it comes to email. I have a semi-tradition now of compiling my personal pet peeves into a column under the heading "Email Curmudgeon." Well, my list of sore points has now grown so that I can produce the third installment in the series. Hopefully we can all find solace in the brief list below. And if you happen to see yourself in any of these descriptions, consider this an intervention.
Sent With Many Exclamation Points
!!!!! Did you hear me? !!!!! I really got your attention, didn't I? Yup. You're totally focused on what I'm saying.
Do you work with people who insist on sending 80 percent of their emails to you as "sent with high importance"? This has to be the 21st century version of the boy who cried wolf. It's basic common sense. If every message that you send is so darn important, then none of them are. Unless the building is on fire, don't mark an email this way. I find it insulting, truth be told. It implies that unless the email were marked this way, I wouldn't pay attention to it. Well, I pay attention to all my emails. I respond to them. I respond to them quickly. I take communication seriously. I never want to leave anyone hanging if it's humanly possible. When I see one of those red exclamation points next to an email message, I'm tempted to ignore it just to teach the sender a lesson.
You Don't Know My Calendar
Not everyone in the world uses Outlook for their calendar, people! So when you send someone an Outlook invite without checking that they use Outlook, you're inconveniencing them. I use Google Calendar because a few years ago I couldn't access my Outlook calendar from home. So that meant I had no way to check what appointments I had on a Monday from my home computer on a Sunday night. At that time, I set up my Google Calendar because I could access it from any computer and it would be too much of a pain to move everything to Outlook or to keep two separate calendars. I suspect I'm not alone. Yet people constantly fire off Outlook invites to me. If you really need Outlook to manage your meeting, that's fine. But ask the group for permission first. Don't assume anything. Ever.
Just Give Me A Call
It drives me nuts when people send me an email and say, "Just give me a call." Invariably, when I "just give them a call," I get voicemail. And then the game of phone tag commences. Email is a great tool to set up appointments. You tell me specifically when you're available and let's set aside a specific time to talk on the phone. Don't make me guess when you might be near to your phone. I'm not in high school anymore. The sheer act of calling someone and leaving a message no longer thrills me. It irritates me. It irritates me almost as much as listening to voice messages people leave for me.
The Looooong Signature
I know you love your social media, but do you really need to list every single social network you belong to in your email signature? And if your company has five Facebook pages, that's fine. Pick the most important one and put that in your signature. Don't include all five with logos and links. And I know you love your Theodore Roosevelt quote, but please remove it. Quotes in your email signature are cheesy.
Scheduling Nightmares
I actually cringe every time I get an email from a colleague who is looking to set up a meeting with a group of more than three people. Because inevitably, the person looking to call the meeting says something like, "Hey. Let's have a meeting. What days are good for you?" And then eight people send eight different emails detailing their schedules. "I've got a dentist appointment tomorrow, so that's out for me!" "I have to pick my grandma up from the airport on Wednesday, so that won't work." And after you've heard way too much about everyone else's schedules, you're no closer to setting a meeting date than you were before wading through the useless emails.
What's particularly frustrating about this is that there's a very simple solution. It's called Doodle. Using Doodle.com, you can set up (for free) a quick poll for a group of people to share their schedules. You can give the group as many or as few options as you want. Once everyone fills it out (which they can do without having to sign up or log in), you have an easily scanned representation of what times and dates work best for the group. By using Doodle you can do with one email what used to take 12. And it's free. So, why aren't you using it?
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Got news for our Digital Diva column? Email Christina Davis at cdavis@wbjournal.com.
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