7 tips to make your email super effective

Organize your text, limit each message to a single topic, avoid jargon and redundancies and, for Pete’s sake, double-check names and spellings. Oh, and when you can, make a phone call.

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Press. Process. Repeat. Email is the modern work processor.

Sending and reading email are essential parts of every professional’s workday. It’s expected that there will be 320 billion emails sent daily by 2021.

Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of written communication has a real impact on your company’s bottom line—so it pays large productivity dividends when people learn how to stop wasting other people’s time with messaging.

That doesn’t mean abandoning it; it means getting smarter about email.

First, before you click another reply, consider picking up the phone. Often a minute of conversation will be more expedient than another round of email; plus, live conversations are relationship builders.

Notice how different channels are consumed, and realize that an all-in-one approach doesn’t match reality. An intranet is great for centralized publishing of content, but the majority is never read. Social chat is great for real-time collaboration, but constant real-time interruptions and having multiple inboxes to manage quickly saps productivity.

When you are sending or replying to an email message, you are demanding the time and attention of your recipients. Here are seven ways not to waste it:

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