Vacation or Communication Nightmare?

It’s a wonder anyone goes on vacation anymore. How often have you heard someone say “I spent five days away from the office, and now I need another five days to catch up!”? We live in a whirlwind of information and communication that whips us around like Dorothy and Toto in the tornado. After a recent long weekend vacation in New York City, 352 email messages and a stack of USPS mail the size of a good-size phonebook welcomed me home. Living in the age of instant communication means that everyone is reachable all the time, and the expectation of all those correspondents is that they will receive responses immediately.

In reality of course, none of us are indispensable to the people who try to communicate with us. People want to check in, check up, connect, or sell something. Better than 85% of the email sent to us on any given day are the type that tell you your “loan has been approved”, while others want to help enlarge or shrink various body parts. Most of the emails I received in that long weekend, you received as well. So what makes the difference between the ones we automatically delete, and the ones we take time to open and read?

Relationships are the foundation of effective communication, and it has become apparent that those bonds are the gatekeepers that most of us use to determine the value of what we’re about to read, or not read. Business emails that get read combine two key components, (1) a known return address and (2) a subject line that draws attention without going overboard. If your friend Tim sends you an email with the subject line “Lottery Winner Announced”, that message gets deleted faster than it takes to complete step one of “shampoo, rinse and repeat.” It doesn’t matter how strong your relationship is with Tim, because his subject line sounded too much like the other 85% of the emails you culled through that morning!

When you address your emails, include your full name in the “from” field, and craft a subject line that’s contextual. And remember that your email may be one of dozens or hundreds that’s being sifted through each day. I’m less skeptical nowadays when a friend or colleague says “I didn’t get your email”. What they mean of course, is that they GOT it, they just didn’t trust the sender or subject line.