Last Updated on November 21, 2023 Sarah Gayda
Adopting the right mindset, skills and tools allows you to embrace email as the highly effective and relevant business medium it is, says author and guest blogger Adrienne Bellehumeur
An article in the New York Times quoted one young entrepreneur who said, “Email is all your stressors in one area, which makes the burnout thing so much harder.” The younger generation is not the first to come to this conclusion.
Many others – including productivity, information management, and organizational design experts – say the same. There’s an anti-email culture out there. But I stand to disagree (and so does the business world).
Most business communication still takes place by email, and most relevant business information is still received by email. Why? Because email works.
Despite the onslaught of new communications tools, email is still one of the best mediums for asking for what you want in business. We have a visceral response to messages that pop into our inbox. It doesn’t matter if there are tools that are slicker, more instantaneous or modern, we are conditioned to respond to our email.
Yes, our ways of communicating will change as technology and our roles evolve. But writing off email undermines one of the most effective ways we have to connect with people and get important work done.
(And besides, fighting email is not worth your energy: resistance is futile.)
Let’s explore an alternative perspective to blaming email for our work woes and accusing it of being inefficient and a time-suck. Email is a superpower. But you have to learn the right mindset, philosophy, skills, habits, and tools to make it work for you.
Four key concepts to shift your attitudes towards email
Let’s explore 4 concepts to help you to turn email into your superpower:
1. Email gets you what you want
Book marketing experts such as Tim Grahl, author of Your First 1000 Copies, are unanimous: email outsells social media. We have an intimate relationship with information that comes into our mailbox whether we want to admit it or not. It screams, “You need to process me!” and elicits connection and action.
Case in point, to sell my book, I have flown to conferences, created newsletter campaigns, hired marketers for social media, created videos, been on countless podcasts, and hosted events. But, do you want to know how I have gained the most response? By communicating and sharing via email!
Seriously, it’s that easy. There’s a reason you still get flyers overflowing your recycling bin. Mail – whether physical or email – converts.
I was once having difficulty getting any traction on a communications tool that my client needed. Our project team has been talking about this for months and I was bouncing the idea from committee to committee within the organization. Out of frustration, I threw the idea into a structured email to the organization’s vice president. The idea got instant engagement. I didn’t need permission to write a formal memo or business case. Everyone has permission to email.
Email is a vehicle to ask for what you want, sell your ideas and make decisions. This is where human psychology comes in. Your ability to sell yourself, business, or concepts through email, among other channels, will accelerate your career overall and your ability to make an impact. It starts with the right mindset on how you view email.
2. Email creates knowledge you can leverage
Text and instant message are like one-night stands. Email is a long-term relationship. Text and instant message may be good for one-off communications like, “Can you make the 3 pm meeting?” But email creates information that you can leverage for future work. It creates a trail of burgeoning intellectual property (IP) – the ideas, insights, and breakthroughs you and your organization are generating. Or should be.
You can mine email. You can save it. You can use the almighty Copy Paste.
It’s my firm belief that writing more down will move your business forward more than almost anything else. A large part of my consulting business is taking information from conversations and then turning it into action. Email is the conduit for turning information garbage into gold.
3. Email is an underrated power skill
Like any other business skill or habit, you need to work at email to make it your superpower. But when you start thinking of it as a skill and habit, you will start to see your abilities grow exponentially.
Most anti-emailers argue that email is a huge distraction. But it is really us that are distracted, and that’s not email’s fault. Now I do find meetings, phone calls, texts, and instant messages to be distracting. But there is an email “Zen” if you look for it.
Email is like a real, physical in- and out-box. That’s what it was designed after, don’t forget! You can pick up this mail when you want. Most of us have (or should have) periods of the day when we are in “focus” mode to get things done and periods when we are in “communicate” mode. Email works in harmony with our daily rhythm between these two modes.
It may sound anti-social to send an email when you could pick up the phone or book a meeting. But depending on the number of projects or clients on your plate, you can’t be on the phone and in meetings all day or you wouldn’t get anything done.
We all need “briefings” (just like the President) to stay on top of what is going on in our projects, operations, or business. Email lets you stay in the know and keep in touch without having to be in meetings all day.
If you are looking for a tip for keeping on top of your email, I’d recommend you consider a 24-Hour Rule turnaround for most emails, where reasonable with your schedule. The 24-Hour Rule is based on the science of how humans process information. We are best at processing information in 24-hour chunks, and so is the person on the other end of our emails. Try it out! (And pick-up your own copy of my book, The 24-Hour Rule for more inspiration too 😉)
4. Email is turbocharged through the right tools
Email is where business decisions are made and solidified, and records are transmitted. Whether the email itself serves as the business record, or the attachment is the record, email is still the best medium for communicating and sharing business records.
Of course, it is not enough to have a record stored in a siloed location like Outlook. Email records should be filed to an appropriate repository (such as SharePoint) for storage and retention.
Utilizing an add-in like Colligo’s Email Manager for Microsoft 365 is a great solution for filing and tagging emails and attachments from within Outlook. In-context email filing means you don’t need to leave Outlook and you and your team can quickly find important company information.
For more information on Colligo Email Manager, get in touch for a personalized demo.
About our guest author
Adrienne Bellehumeur is the Owner of Risk Oversight, a leading Canadian firm specializing in governance, risk and compliance, internal audit, SOX, and CSOX programs. She is the founder of Bellehumeur Co., where she consults, speaks, trains, and writes on documentation and workflow best practices and the author of THE 24-HOUR RULE—and Other Secrets for Smarter Organizations, which you can think of as the first “mass market” book on documentation best practices.
