does not matter as they probably were all stone heads). That started the communication evolution process for us.
the Arabs went the wrong way, but they were somewhere at least. Centuries passed, with paper, ink , TV , radio, telegraph , telephone
and car horns being invented as enhanced modes of communication. Then came the email.
Email evolved as a permanent communication , which even survived thunder, rain, fire and disk crashes due to backup mongers. This led the
managers think of it is as a perfect control tool over their employees. How ? Well , anything you write can be used against you. And hence I present you my third lesson in these 10 years of work experience.
All office emails follow one basic principle. They should be cc-ed to as many people as possible. For example if the tube light right
above your head is not working, you should write a mail to the Facilities department, and cc it to
- your department head
- your manager
- your entire team
- the six or seven people who sit around your cube
- the security
- the reception.
disturbed with needless queries.
The second most important rule of office emails is that they should not contain any punctuation characters except the comma and the period.
Any other punctuation mark is unnecessarily emotional. Specially the exclamation sign. The goddamn thing is called the exclamation mark, so
why put it in the mails you write. If you send an exclamation mark to your manager, he would think that his employee is surprised about
something and would take a two hour one-on-one with you to resolve any such confusions. Inevitably, you would come out of the meeting all burnt out because you would have been convinced that you are the one who is running away with the shareholders’ money every month. Too much price to pay for an exclamation mark.
punctuation marks in my book -”Punctuation in Internet society”.
(Special discounts if you post a comment to this blog post.)
Another trap which most naive emailers fall into is what I call the North Korean trap. In this trap typically the sender writes long mails , with the largest paragraph describing the issue of least importance. The more important issues are mentioned in smaller paragraphs. A visual look into this makes you believe that the longest paragraph contains the major-most issue( and typically anybody’s manager insures that he or she does not have any time read long mails at ease). This wrong notion makes you concentrate on least important issues and the more important problems are neglected.
There is another thing about Office emails which can not be ignored in this lesson. Attachments. To tell you the truth, people only love those attachments which either have funny jokes or nasty photographs in them. Some people like sweet poems and baby photographs too, but no one likes to receive Design Specifications or Annual Budget Allocations or for that matter even Flow diagrams. That is why you should attach as many of such things, as possible to your official emails. If almost every other email of yours carries a PDF file or a doc file with such serious stuff, chances are that very soon your boss will stop reading your emails. Good for you.
The email lesson has more rules than the above (like selff CCs, scheduled mails, anticipatory mails etc.) - but I want to first list down the 7 other lessons - and then probably revisit email again. So keep checking this site (and keep commenting, that keeps me going)
