- Real advice to find the perfect fit
- Is 70 the new 50 in the workplace?
- Can you get the message across?
- Job seekers and the privacy principle
- The kids are all right
- Time for a ‘slash’ title?
- Follow @phillycomjobs on twitter
Weekly Poll: What has contributed most to your being in your current job?
RELATED STORIES
Few would argue that e-mail management is a huge time waster. It’s necessary to stay on top of it, though, or else it piles up and becomes overwhelming.
But what if there were far fewer e-mails to begin with?
There would be if it weren’t for the indiscriminate use of “Reply All,” says Timothy Whitmore, a vice president of Simpler North America, which consults with companies that want to run tighter ships.
Employees’ e-mail volume would drop suddenly and significantly were offices to outlaw “Reply All” or at least require workers to use it sparingly, he says.
“Many of us get added to an e-mail chain for one question and continue to receive responses long after we have any reason to be included,” he says, so repliers need to be mindful of removing unnecessary recipients.
Whitmore recommends adopting time-saving protocols, such as adding an R, A or I to the subject line of every e-mail sent out to indicate whether the e-mail requires a response, an action or is purely informational.
This curbs the temptation to use “Reply All,” since the sender generally would be obliged to stop and compose an additional e-mail to forward, tagged with an I, when they just want to keep others in the loop.
