Improve Your Email Writing to Save Time

Over 320 billion emails are sent each day.

Imagine the productivity gains if we all improve our email writing skills by just 5%. This alone would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

So here’s my humble contribution to that great cause.

The best emails answer questions before they are asked.

This is how you do it. When you’ve finished writing an email, pause and ask yourself: what are the 2-3 questions that someone with less knowledge of the situation is likely to ask?

Make sure your email answers those 2-3 questions. If you do that, you will save yourself and everyone else on the email chain a great deal of back and forth.

So hold yourself from now on to this standard: that no email you write will ever be responded to with a clarifying question.

Do that consistently as a team, and you will save about two hours per week per team member. Bloody marvellous – and it’s low hanging fruit.