I don’t know about you, but I use my Outlook calendar to remind me of any number of things, not just work meetings and deadlines. For example, if I have a dentist appointment scheduled during normal working hours, I’ll put an appointment reminder on my calendar for 4:00 PM the day before. That way, right before I leave it will remind me of that appointment the next day. However, I also use it for tasks that I need to do but that I tend to put off. I’ll set it up to remind me every X amount of hours so that I’m constantly bothered to get it done. This cuts down on my procrastination time, but that doesn’t mean it still doesn’t take me a while to get it done. A great example of this is an upcoming airline reservation I have.

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Three little dots. That’s all that they are, just three little dots. However, I can’t figure them out. To give a little background on this conundrum, I received an email today and the sender kept using these dots in-between their sentences. For example:

“I’ll pick up that later…it shouldn’t be a problem. Let’s meet tomorrow to discuss it…3:00 works for me”.

Now traditionally, these dots can be used to indicate that more is to come, cliff-hanger style. For example, the conclusion of a mystery novel “And the killer is…..”. They are also used as a common convention in software such as Microsoft Office to indicate that further action is required. One example of this is the classic “Open…” option. The problem is that I don’t think the above sentence fits into either of these categories.

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Everybody has their pet peeves. For some people, it’s the sound of a pencil tapping repeatedly on the table. For others, it’s the constant sniffling of a nose. Whatever the peeve, it is unbelievably annoying to us. One of my biggest pet peeves happens to be unnecessarily rude email. I just cannot stand it. I’m not talking about somebody sending you an email outright insulting you, I’m talking about those one line emails with no greeting or salutation or any personal touches at all.

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People are always looking for better ways to deal with the massive amounts of email that circulate through our inboxes everyday. It can definitely feel sometimes that you are overwhelmed with email, and that you’re actually spending more time with your email than doing actual work. In the article below, Sharon Sarmiento discusses seven tips that she thinks will help to tame the savage beast that is your inbox. I don’t agree with them all, however read the article and judge for yourself. You can find my comments immediately following the article in the My Comments section.

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Ah, email: The ever tricky and immensely popular form of communication that has spread like wildfire through almost every industry around the globe. It is so popular, that many times the only way that you communicate with your clients is through email. This makes it even more important that you take extra care when writing work emails. With this in mind, here are some of the things I keep in mind when writing emails to my clients.

*Note: While the main topic of this article concerns writing emails to your clients, this can also apply to emails you write to your boss or other people who are influential where it concerns you.

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Raise your hand if you use your Out Of Office assistant when you go on vacation (I hope your hand is raised). Now, keep it raised if you also check your email while you’re on vacation (probably a good majority of you still have your hand raised). Here’s the big question: Keep your hand raised if you respond to email while on vacation. Hand still raised? Half raised? This is a dilemma that many people face when on vacation: Should you respond to your email? There’s no simple answer for this, but there are many things to consider when making this decision.

To start, sometimes you don’t have a choice. If it’s something urgent, and you don’t see anybody else taking the lead on it, you may have to send out an email. Hopefully, you’ve left a contact person who is competent enough to take care of this for you. However, if a decision needs to be made and you’re the only one to do it, even the most competent person in the world won’t be able to make it for you. On the flip side, if you don’t have access to your email, then obviously you won’t be responding to anything.

Most of the time, you won’t run into either of the above situations. You should have a choice whether to answer it or not. In my opinion, if you take the time to leave a good person as your contact person, you shouldn’t have to answer it. This is my preferred path when on vacation for the following main reason: Everybody knows you’re out of the office (hopefully you’ve communicated this to all your clients as well), so they should not be expecting back an answer from you. By answering, you open yourself up to the possibility of having to work for the rest of your vacation as people know you are checking your email. Obviously, this defeats the purpose of your vacation.

The most important piece of advice I can give here is to leave someone competent in your place. This will solve the problem 95% of the time. For that last 5%, you are probably going to have to do something about the situation. However, one way to mitigate the impact of your vacation is to funnel your answers through your contact people. Call them up and explain what needs to be done. If they can handle it, then all you might have to do is monitor the situation instead of having to get directly involved. Another way to lessen the impact could be to suck it up and solve the problem immediately. Call whoever needs to be called, spend all the time to solve the problem in one shot instead of stringing it along. This way, maybe only one day is devoted to work instead of everyday.

Overall, try to enjoy your vacations as much as possible. If you have to put any work in, try to do it in such a way that the amount of time you need to spend working is minimized. Also, the better qualified your contact person is, the less likely it is that you will have to step in and solve a problem.

With the prominence of email in the workplace today as a major means of communication, more and more important correspondence is sent strictly through email. What does this mean? This means that an email that sits in your inbox for two days because you are on vacation could potentially have disastrous consequences. This is why the Out of Office Assistant is more important than ever.

*Note: For this article, I will be dealing with the Out of Office Assistant in Microsoft Outlook 2003. If you don’t use Microsoft Outlook for your email, you should investigate what a similar function would be on your email client.

The Out of Office Assistant works very much like an Away Message in AOL Instant Messenger (IM) if you are familiar with that tool. Basically, you write a few lines of text that is automatically sent to anybody who emails you.

There is a very simple process to do this. First, go to Tools - Out of Office Assistant…. The following pop-up window should be displayed:

As shown above, there are two radio buttons at the top of the window. This toggles the Out of Office Assistant on and off. Important note: Make sure to turn this OFF when you are back in the office. You don’t want to leave this on for a week after you get back.

The “AutoReply” text box is where you type the message you want sent to people when they send you email. In the above screenshot, I have a basic message that I use and modify for each time I’m going to be away from the office. The critical pieces of information you need to provide in this message are the following:

1. The date range for which you will not be in the office.
2. The person to contact in your absence.
3. The subject matter that this contact person can answer questions on.

You should have more than one contact person if you need multiple people to cover multiple different subjects while you are away.

Once this message is crafted, all you have to do is click the “OK” button and your Out of Office Assistant will be turned on. You can also perform more complex functions using the “Add Rule…” button, where you can add rules for when you are away. This works just like creating normal rules in Microsoft Outlook. I don’t use this functionality, but it might come in handy if, for instance, you want all messages from a certain person to be auto-forwarded to one of your contacts.

The Out Of Office Assistant is an extremely valuable tool that you should make sure to take advantage of. Don’t get in trouble because an important email rotted in your inbox while you were at the beach; Take the time to turn on the Out of Office Assistant.

Today, email is one of the prime means of communication at the workplace. Consequently, it can be disastrous if you don’t have access to it. How could this happen? The answer is simple: you go over the size limit on your account. This usually leads to you not being able to receive or send email until the size of your account goes back under the limit. What could cause this? The usual culprit here is large file attachments. This is why it is so essential to Zip your attachments before sending out your email.

Zip refers to a process by which you can compress files into a smaller archive, sometimes cutting the size of contents of the Zip File in half. For example, if I had two Microsoft Word documents and a Microsoft Excel document that I was going to send out to my team, I would add all three to a Zip File then attach this file to the email instead of attaching the three documents separately.

This has the following advantages:

• As stated above, this will usually drastically decrease the size of the email. This is especially true in documents that may contain a lot of pictures, charts, or process flows (such as process flows from Microsoft Visio). As a rule of thumb, I Zip any document that is half a Megabyte or more (this might show as 500kb as the file size, which is the size in Kilobytes).

• This will also keep groups of documents better organized. In the above example, this would allow the audience to keep track of one file instead of three. Also, if you were to have multiple groups of documents in an email, you could Zip each group.

• A smaller email will obviously download faster, so if you Zip your attachments your audience will appreciate the fact that didn’t have to sit there staring at their Inbox for 10 minutes while your message downloaded. You don’t always know the connection speeds of your clients, so this can be a big deal for those on dial-up connections.

The argument some people make for not zipping their files is that their email accounts have a very large size limit (which is pretty true today across the board). However, when sending attachments, you must also take into account the audience you’re sending it to. Much like their connection speed, you don’t always know how their email is configured, and it probably isn’t a good idea to kill their account because you sent unzipped attachments.

Now that you’re ready to Zip your attachments, how do you do it? This is another easy answer. In order to Zip a file, you can use any number of free programs out there. The program I use is called WinZip. You must purchase this software, but I also believe that windows has a native utility to Zip files, although I have not used it. If you do a search on “free zip programs”, you should get plenty of options.

In the end, it takes very little time to Zip your attachments, and the benefits explained above are well worth it.

Chances are, you’ve heard the term “Work Safe” thrown around your office when talking about email.  What does this mean? 

To begin, I’ll define the context in which you probably heard it used. “Work Safe” is usually used in the context of personal email received in a work account.  This could be email forwards from your friends (which are usually pretty rampant), or any other email that contain non-work related information.  Most of the time, you are not the only one in the office, so a “Work Safe” email can be defined as an email that is able to be read by you at work without having to scurry to close a browser window, run to turn down the sound, or even shut your laptop down to stop the display on your screen.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that the email doesn’t contain something that could cause these actions; it just means that you knew that there might be problems before you opened the email, so you took the necessary precautions (headphones, etc.).

It is a good rule to follow when sending personal email to label it “Work Safe” or “Non-Work Safe” before you send it out.  This can save your friends a lot of embarrassment and possibly even save their jobs if the wrong person is walking by when they open the email.  You should always place this in the subject of the email, so your audience doesn’t have to actually open the email to find out.  ALWAYS specify if something may not be appropriate for work, I’ve seen people get into a lot of trouble for this kind of thing.  Even if you just send a link, make sure before you forward it on that you know if your friends are safe to open it.

Overall, if your email is not “Work Safe”, you probably should be sending to a personal account instead of a work account anyways.  However, if you are going to send it, make sure to be specific as to what the email contains.  This can save embarrassment, friendships, and even jobs (usually all of the above).

With email swiftly becoming the main means of communication between many of today’s professionals, knowing how to craft a professional email has become essential.  Not only will it make you look good to your prospective clients or peers, but it will also make the contents of your message clearer to your intended audience.

The following is a list of three common professional email do’s and don’ts:

DO

• Always spell-check your email before it goes out.  If you use Outlook, you can set it so that the spell-check always runs before an email is sent.  There’s nothing that irritates me more than when I get an email from a colleague and “the” is misspelled.

• Always include your contact information in your signature when dealing with clients.  This is essential as some clients prefer to talk on the phone or meet face to face than communicate through email.  A good way to remember this is to add it to your signature.

• Always check to make sure that you’ve attached any files you want to send with the email BEFORE you send it out.  Those “Oh, here’s the attachment because I forgot to send it the first seven times” emails are extremely annoying.

DON’T

• Never use internet shorthand or slang in a formal email.  For example, always spell out “You” instead of using “U”.  This may sound like common sense, but you would be surprised how many people let this slip, especially when they are switching between writing personal and professional email.

• Never copy additional clients or peers on the email unless you are absolutely sure that it is ok to do so.  On the client side, you never know what kind of internal politics are going on, so always check with your supervisor first.  Also, internally, sometimes an email should only go to certain people on your team, so once again check with your supervisor before sending it out.

• Never send a lot of personal correspondence through your work email.  An occasional email is fine, but many times companies screen their employees email, and they don’t like to see a lot of personal email taking up much of your time.  They also might object to content sent to you by your friends.

Overall, when you’re writing an email at work, try to pretend that instead of writing you are presenting the contents to your boss.  If your email passes that filter, then it should be fine to send.  Otherwise, it’s probably a good idea to create another draft.