The one email trick that saved me 2 hours every Monday morning

I used to spend my Monday mornings reading through a pile of replies and digging for action items. Then I noticed my coworker in accounting never had this problem. She told me she writes all her work emails with the action request in bold right at the top before the polite stuff. Now I do the exact same thing. No more scrolling through paragraphs to find what someone actually needs from me. It cut my email processing time from around 2.5 hours down to maybe 45 minutes. Has anyone else tried putting the ask first in their emails or do you have a different system?

2 comments

2 Comments

nora18413d ago

the action request in bold right at the top before the polite stuff" - yeah that's smart but here's the thing nobody's mentioning. If everyone starts doing this, are we just training ourselves to skip straight to the bold part and ignore everything else? I've already caught myself skimming past context and background details because my brain goes straight to the bold text. Might be saving time now but I wonder if it's gonna cause more misunderstandings down the road when people miss the nuance that got buried under the polite stuff.

robertb3012d ago

Feel like we're borrowing trouble over something that's not really broken yet.