Poll Results: How Do You Wrangle Your Email?

on May 31, 2011

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You are some extremely organized folks, and you’re not afraid to tell others about it. According to our most recent poll, a whopping 43% of you believe in a totally empty in-box. The rest of you were more or less split between either strictly managing your messages (“Filter. Delete. Unsubscribe. Repeat.”) or just letting them all pile up. The full results are below.

How do you handle your incoming messages?

 

They’re dealt with immediately. I’m a proud member of the Zero Inbox club.
43%

I don’t move, archive, or delete anything. If I need to find something, then I use search.
29%

Filter. Delete. Unsubscribe. Repeat.
24%

I ignore my inbox as much as possible.
5%

No cc’s for me. I use the semi-nuclear option and delete any emails that don’t have my name in the To field.
0%

I have only a few emails in my inbox at any one time. On the other hand, my archive holds 369 folders, and I hate it.
0%


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When Sending an Email Is a Terrible Idea

on May 31, 2011

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Email is probably responsible for saving more time in the office than any other recent technology. Tasks that used to require letters and phone calls–which often went unanswered, and had to be followed by a series of messages left and ignored–can now be handled with a few taps on a keyboard.

But email can also waste hours and hours. Think about how many times you’ve been inundated with a dozen messages in a row from people hitting the Reply All to weigh in on some point of trivia that could have been solved with one conversation. What used to be a dialogue between two people becomes a conversation among four, five, or fifteen. It’s like part of our brain is always in a meeting.

I once worked in an office where Reply All was responsible for so much lost efficiency that managers actually announced a plan to disable the Reply All button on all our computers. The plan was abandoned when they discovered this was impossible—but you could understand where they were coming from. Email also strips vocal tone and body language away from our words. Without that nonverbal information, criticisms sting harder, requests seem abrupt, and genuine praise can fall flat.

After all this time, why are we still struggling with email? I think it’s because different jobs carry different expectations, and norms vary drastically from office to office. And the plain truth is, email is writing, and some people are better writers than others.

Even if you aren’t a champion writer, you can still keep from flailing when you use email. Here are ten guidelines that can help your emails turn out better—or help you know when not to send an email at all. Your approach may vary, but I’ve found that these work for me.

1. Only send an email if it’s faster than a phone call or a person-to-person conversation.    Read More →

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Bullet Points: Horrible PowerPoint Slides; How to Get Ahead in 1959; Craigslist’s Founder Starts Temping for the Feds

on May 27, 2011

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  • If you haven’t voted already, check out our poll on dealing with email. A surprisingly unpopular method: filing every message.
  • The projector company InFocus recently ran a contest looking for the worst PowerPoint slides it could find. To the right is a detail of the winner, “IT Modernization Roadmap.” Easy to follow, right? [via Boing Boing]
  • Craig Newmark was recently sworn in as a temporary worker for the Social Security Administration. He’ll be advising the SSA’s chief information officer about customer service and online authentication. A good example of a portfolio career….
  • Welcome to “in-sourcing”: lawyers are being hired by big firms to do high-value work in small American cities. The trick is that they’re doing it for far less than the partner-track gets you in the big city. Expect to see this attempted in other industries as well, if it hasn’t been tried already. [NYT]
  • “Begin at the very beginning to see how USEFUL you can be…” In 1959, Billy Marchal’s grandfather wrote him a letter with advice on how to excel at his first job. It still holds up. [Times-Picayune]
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Bullet Points: “Social Media Backlash” Edition

on May 26, 2011

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  • “I will never hire a ‘social media expert,’” writes Peter Shankman in a much commented-on post that’s been tearing up the Twitter charts in the past few days. “Social media, by itself, will not help you,” writes the social media entrepreneur.
  • Social media strategist Alan Wolk writes a column defending those gurus, whoever they are.
  • Ricky Engelberg, Nike’s Global Digital Innovation Director calls the “Like” button the most valuable thing on the Internet. A billion cat videos beg to differ.
  • If allowing people to Like your products and therefore lead others to them is valuable, it isn’t yet that valuable in the mundane make-some-bucks way. As Peter Yared at VentureBeat puts it, “Most products have too short a shelf life to accumulate many Likes. In addition, very few people are clicking Like on a product since it is broadcast to all of their friends, and instead are using the ‘email to a friend’ feature so they can ask a select set of people if they like an item. Email is really making Facebook miserable when it comes to e-commerce.”
  • If people avoid Liking companies’ products, it might also be because they’re not really that into what companies have on offer. According to a recent study by IBM, companies mostly think people want to be friends with their brands, but what they really want is a good deal: “… a majority of consumers say the top reasons they interact with companies via social sites are to receive discounts and make purchases, but companies rank those as the least likely reasons customers will follow them.”
  • All that social media probably is taking up valuable time that could otherwise be spent at the proverbial watercooler or perhaps even working–as PC World puts it, Social networks distract at work. Seriously.

    [Image: Stallio/flickr]

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“Drinking the Kool-Aid” and Other Corporate Clichés to Avoid

on May 25, 2011

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Editorial consultant Deborah Gaines has a client list that includes major publishers and international law firms. (Full disclosure: The Hired Gun’s blog editor, John Rambow, has worked for her in the past.) Recently, she started The Corporate Writer, a blog that covers the (often subpar) ways that language is used at work–whether it’s in the messages that help get you hired in the first place, weird office-speak, or the constantly changing world of email etiquette. We talked with Deborah about what sort of language problems are worth trying to avoid at work–and also what you might have to let slide.

Congrats on the new site–what made you decide to start it?
I was whining to someone about business-language felonies and she said, “You’re obsessed. You should do a blog.”

Do you think that written communication has gotten worse? Or does bad communication just seem to stick around longer now?
I don’t know if it’s gotten worse–a recent post, In praise of humane writing, quotes a hilarious memo on the subject from 1977. But there is definitely more bad writing floating around since we all adopted computers and smartphones. We pay less attention to what we say because it’s so much easier to just blurt.    Read More →

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Bullet Points: TwitPic Wants to License Photos; Intern Flubs; Great Job Ads

on May 24, 2011

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  • Popular photo site TwitPic has an expansive user agreement that gives it and “affiliated sites” the right to use or distribute content that people have uploaded. Now TwitPic has signed up a photo agency to do just that.
  • The Vault has 6 ways to make your internship count; taking a darker view, eFinancialCareers gives you a “full list of the fatal errors” that investment-banking interns make. A lot of the mistakes would apply to any competitive, high-pressure internship…
  • Poynter recently held a live chat about the ways that LinkIn can be used both for reporting and for looking for a job in the first place–they are highly related skills, after all. Here’s the transcript.
  • If you really want to make sure you get the most out of the financial investment that you (or someone close to you) may be making in college, then petroleum engineering and pharmaceutical science are the majors to go for. [WSJ]
  • Writing a job description must be hard: there are so many vague or otherwise less-than-great examples out there. Erica Swallow of Mashable has some tips on writing a description that will bring in the best candidates possible.
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The Hired Guns Poll: How Do You Deal with Overflowing Email?

on May 23, 2011

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After a long day of sifting through super-important requests as well as the latest passel of Groupon offers, it occurred to us that we’re probably not the only ones who sometimes feel overwhelmed by email. Although its death has been predicted over and over, email remains a sore spot for even the most technologically proficient. We were curious to find out how you deal with your email inbox.

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Freelancing? Get Some Stability with a Portfolio Career

on May 23, 2011

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This Wednesday, May 25, David Holloway will be teaching a Hired Guns Academy class on How to Develop a Portfolio Career. Below he explains how this method can remove the ups and downs that come with a typical freelance career.

“Freelancing” is one of those amorphous terms that mean different things to different people. So here’s what I mean when I use the word: Freelancing is where you’re primarily working alone, using one main skill to generate a service offering that you are deploying outside of full-time employment. For example, photographers, graphic designers, social media consultants, and independent marketing professionals are often freelancers.

The freelance career approach can definitely work, and if you’re in a good place with it, more power to you. But in the coaching work I do, I constantly hear about three main challenges with this type of career:

  • Because freelancers often focus on one main skill area, they are vulnerable to changes in the marketplace–a steep revenue drop or the appearance of a new competitor, for example. When you’re only “eating what you kill” and you only eat one kind of food, some scary scenarios are possible. Consider the vulnerability of freelance writers, already struggling to make sufficient income, who are now being forced to compete with online writers who contribute work for a share of ad revenue–or who even write for free. This challenge seems to be growing by the day, and there’s no end in sight.

    •    Read More →

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Bullet Points: To Err is Human; Planning for Job Loss; Couch-potato Multitasking

on May 23, 2011

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  • Are young, female employees a risky investment for financial companies, because they tend to leave? The Vault steps into a bit of a minefield….
  • Think you might lose your job? Lifehacker has come advice on battening down the hatches so that you’ll be in best possible position if it does happen.
  • “Millions of people are watching their favorite shows while babbling about them on Facebook.” Joel Falconer of The Next Web finds all this leisure-time multitasking more than a little pathetic.
  • Why is it so annoying to be wrong? The journalist Kathryn Schulz has some answers–and also looks into the upside of erring. [CNN]
  • Speaking of erring: Milton Glaser, Wally Olins, and three other “design demigods” were interviewed by Swedish students about what they learned from failing. Inspirational. [CoDesign]

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The Java Fix: What Else Is in Your Coffee?

on May 20, 2011

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Brooke Alpert is a nutritionist and the founder of B Nutritious, a private nutrition counseling practice based in New York City. She blogs for us about how to stay healthy, fit, and centered during even the craziest of work weeks.

As if you needed a new reason to drink coffee: a recent Swedish study, published in Stroke, a journal of the American Heart Association, found that women who drank at least one cup of coffee a day had a 24% reduction in stroke risk over a decade. (It should be noted that drinking more coffee didn’t lower the risk of stroke any further, and that the study is silent on how coffee intake may affect men’s risk of stroke.) Such a limited study isn’t a reason to start drinking coffee if you don’t already, but it can put you at ease if you consider coffee a coworker and a friend.

I’m fine with my clients who like their coffee, and I have no shame that I pray at my Nespresso machine every morning. Coffee has antioxidants and other compounds that can lower inflammation as well as improve insulin sensitivity. But–and this is a Venti’s worth of but–when done wrong, coffee might as well be dessert. When I ask my clients how they like their coffee, I’m often surprised at what they put in it. Between the cream, the whole milk, sugar (or artificial sugars), syrups, and whipped cream, we can certainly not expect much in the way of heart-healthy or waist benefits here.    Read More →

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