Peevish

This morning I retweeted a link to a blog post: 10 Ways to Tick Me Off. The post was written by a university lecturer, “documenting my annoyances for students”.

On reading my tweet, one of my colleagues asked me what my annoyances were. I said I’d have to blog to write them all down.

I can list many annoyances quite easily.

This got me thinking, am I really as peevish as that? Are they really that important? (Am I really that important??)

Many of my peeves are related to misuse of email.

Rather than write these as a series of admonishments, I thought I’d try to frame them in a more positive light – do, rather than don’t.

1. Do get to the point. If you’re emailing me for work/professional purposes, please be aware that I get way more email than I’d like, each day. Keep it short and sweet. There is no need to begin with “Hi, how are you?”, when really all you need to tell me is “Please send me the report on the budget by the end of this week.” In my chat with my colleague I qualified this by saying that I don’t mind you asking me how I am before you get to the point, if we know each other – but it’s really not necessary. (Interestingly, at a recent workshop on communication, some of the women who were participating said they felt they needed to write some niceties first if they don’t know the person they are emailing to ask for something. I’d just find it inane and insincere. Just me?)

2. Related to this, if you need to give me a lot of information/background/history about something, do consider calling me to tell me about it before you write that three page email. Most of us don’t write that well (I count myself in this), and it’s way too easy to get the story garbled when you’re trying to get it down in writing. In the work environment we’re also always rushing to get to the next task. Our writing suffers. If we’ve already talked about it, when you do then write the email you can hopefully keep it relatively brief and simple. Also, having to read paragraphs and paragraphs of email to get to the part where you tell me what you would like me to do? Tiresome.

3. Having said that, do include the important details. For instance, if you’re referring to a website, please include the URL. Don’t leave me trying to guess exactly which page or site you’re referring to. Yes, even if you think it should be really obvious to me. Given that email is a record, what is obvious at the time may not be obvious in a few months’ time.

4. Do seriously consider WHY you’re copying in all those three, or four, or five or however many people into that email you’re writing. Email should not be a substitute for a conversation. If I email you to ask a question, and you need to check with someone else for more information before you get back to me, why don’t you do that? Ask them the question (email them if you have to), then get back to me with the answer. I don’t want to read the however many emails worth of discussion you need to have to find out more detail before you give me my answer. Leave me out of your fact finding email threads, please.

5. Does it really need to be email? I’m guilty of this myself, writing email when it might be better to call someone for a quick chat. Maybe the news you need to convey is a bit touchy, or complex. When you talk to the other person, you can soften the blow, ask questions, clarify (see point 2).

Oh dear, this is sounding rather admonishing, isn’t it?

What are your gripes? Are they all around email, like mine seem to be at the moment?