How to Get a Faster Response to Your E-mail
September 6, 2007
This is an interesting article that lists a few things you can do to help ensure a quicker email response. The author make a great point that sometimes slow response times are due to the recipient’s pure ineptitude. But outside of that, he focuses on the sender’s role in trying to make it as easy as possible to facilitate a quick response.
I especially agree with point number 4: If the message is getting too long, and/or it’s a huge discussion with many parties chiming in with lots of back and forth - email is probably no longer the appropriate communication tool. It may be time to make a call, or even schedule a meeting (not that I’m huge fan of meetings either, see meetings suck!) But somtimes meetings are the appropriate answer.
4. Keep the message short. Again, remember the two-minute rule. If it takes longer than two minutes for the recipient to read your message, it will likely get set aside. In fact, they may never get back to it! So, keep it short. I like the advice some people are now giving: keep your message to five sentences or less. If it takes more than this, you should seriously consider another method of communication (e.g. a phone call, meeting, formal report, etc.)
Read the whole article Here
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2 Responses to “How to Get a Faster Response to Your E-mail”
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I use a program called msgtag that adds an image to the bottom of the email that says “the sender has been notified that you have received this message” and I get a notification as soon as that image is seen.
that always gets people responding back sooner rather than later!
Hey Andy,
A friend of mine works for a company called Seriosity www.seriosity.com they develop a product that is designed to assign “value” to an email.
They give all their employees a limited supply of what they call “Serios.” One can apply more serios to an email to mark it as more valuable/important, but then they are deducted from your account.
Check it out … it’s an interesting idea.