Now that you have your own corporate e-mail accounts, time has come to speak about e-mail as a whole. E-mail is a great technology. It is simple; it is fast; and thanks to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, it is everywhere. We all should thank those who invented this communication system back in 1970s.

Yet e-mail has become a major obstacle in most modern careers and companies too. Several studies in the human resources and industrial engineering fields claim that people waste too much time in their e-mail. (Excuse me for not placing a link to any source, but most of the studies I found would still need peer review and confirmation to be more reliable. Let’s assume this from an empiric viewpoint for the time being, as most of us may have noticed all the time we spend some time on emails in our professional lives.)

Those who want to have a company that grows, need to be smart about e-mail and prevent the nagging vices we all complain about. Here you have our recommendations:

Be smart about how often you and your staff check their e-mail

Here is the plain English version. Only your sales and customer service staff need to check their e-mail very often. It is obvious why: because you don’t want your potential and current clients to wait for an answer. The very opposite: you want to show them how great your service is. They give you their money and they need to be treated with preference and diligence.

The rest of your staff do not need to focus on their e-mail accounts, but rather on their work. They should not check their e-mail very often. Once an hour is usually enough. Try to either establish it as a policy or just ask your computer guy to configure e-mail clients like that. In the event you need something with urgency, don’t just send the information or files via e-mail. Either use an instant messaging service or call. That’s what the telephone is there for!

Once you receive your e-mail, get rid of it

Merlin Mann published his Inbox Zero policy together with a speech he gave at Google some time ago, and I must say his approach makes a lot of sense. If we are checking our e-mail and we are already using our time on that task, then we should finish with it.

How you do it depends exclusively on how you prefer to do it, but the goal remains the same: to treat e-mail just like any other task you recurrently do along the day —that is, you begin with it, you finish with it, you move on—; and not like the task which is permanently open while you multi-task doing your job. If you allow that to happen, then e-mail will become a distraction, and productivity at work will decline.

How to deal with the e-mail you receive, then? The Inbox Zero approach (and we) recommend…

• To reply fast to e-mails if it just takes one or two minutes
• To forward the e-mails which need to be processed by someone else
• To add to the to-do list (red flag) all those emails that require attention later

…and to get rid of the messages once you are done with them. And we don’t mean to delete them, though some can be just deleted.

Where to place them? All e-mail clients and services have organization features, namely filters and folders. Use them to organize the e-mails in groups, for example…

• The ones which are already read and/or answered and just kept for the record
• The ones which need to be replied later
• The ones which contain important information and that should be at hand fast

…or as many other options as you need for your company.

If you are to write an email, make it short or clear. Did you notice the “or”?

E-mails are best used if they comply with two requirements: mercifully short while perfectly clear. You need to know these two requirements do not need to be together all the time, though.

If you can write a short e-mail which is simple, clear and, above all, complete, please do.

If you need to add details for clarity or precision, then please add them all. Do not make them guess. If you do, by mistake, what you will get in return is another e-mail with plenty of follow-up questions, and you will both hate that.

Last but not least, if you are to reply to an e-mail message, make sure you are replying to the question asked! Here is an anecdote? I once wrote an e-mail to a new Internet Service Provider company. I just wanted to know the price of their services because their website did not show any pricing. What I got as reply was an e-mail asking for my full name, telephone number, address and some other personal information… Everything they needed, but not my answer. I was really interested, so I sent the information they asked for. The next day, I got a new e-mail in which the company informed me they had appointed a lady as my personal sales executive. I was glad I had a sales executive for my account, sure, but I still did not receive a price. I wrote to this lady, and asked for a price; to which she replied asking me what kind of service I was looking for. I had to send one more e-mail to be able to get the price. The price was too high for me and I decided not to buy. If you see the reasoning, I had to send 4 e-mails instead of just sending one, and I got a sales executive appointed despite the fact I was just asking a very simple question.

If you want to have a successful company, you really need to avoid that. Make sure you are answering the bloody question.

Smart signatures

Now and then I receive an e-mail with a long footer text. The footer sometimes asks me to think about the planet before printing the e-mail. You, please, do not post that as a signature ever. Professional people do not sign their e-mails like that.

Why not? Because printing an e-mail is only something people do when they consider it important. I have never known anybody who just prints all of their e-mails because they want to, have you?

What to include instead? Along with your name, and position of course, it may be wise to include a phone number, yes, I may just want to call you, or a very short line about what your company does. Your reader may learn a bit more about you, especially if you are exchanging your first e-mails with him or her.

Reread before sending

Do you know why there are so many e-mails out there with so many spelling mistakes and typos, with so many “its” instead of “it’s?” It is because of haste. The problem with haste is that it shows you as a careless unprofessional individual, so it is something you must avoid at all costs. Reread your e-mail before sending. It is a healthy habit, and it can take you very far.

Stay away from office games

I am leaving this for last because it’s so, so, so common… I am speaking about office games. People are people and there will always be someone who doesn’t like someone else. It is normal. It happens all the time. However, sometimes those “I don’t like you” slide into e-mail communications starting shameful and time-taking flame wars around the office. Every business owner needs to keep an eye and learn how to stop those situations fast. Your objective is to be productive, not to turn your e-mails into a chit chat.

Questions or comments? What do you think?