How NOT To Start The New Year

Don’t start the New Year with a nightmare in your inbox.

It happened to me again. Inbox overwhelm.

I sat down at my desk for the first time, full of enthusiasm to start the year.

Then I opened my email. There were hundreds of emails, all screaming at me to be read.

I am now sitting here overwhelmed.

I don’t want to go through all the emails and sort the important ones from the spammy ones. Who wants to start the year using their new energy and enthusiasm to do the administrative sorting?

I want to sink my teeth into something meaty, something exciting

But I can’t even begin to tell which emails feed into such a project. If only I had could see at a quick glance which emails will inform my favourite projects and which emails to ignore.

I know I’m not alone in this dilemma. I’m sure you, your client and your boss probably feel the same way. It might take them all week before they get to your email and give you the response you need to keep working on your project.

[tip title=”Imagine…if you could make sure they knew that your email would help them sink their teeth into that project…

 

Imagine… if your email was the first one they dealt with because they could see what it was about straight away without having to trawl through all their emails first…”]

Find out how in our FREE mini-masterclass.

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How did we get to this point?

Everyone uses email. Everyone gets emails. It is so prolific you can be sure somebody is emailing about any given topic right now. People’s inbox can number in the 1000s, many of them unread. It is the primary tool of communication in the modern world.

Very few people use email well in the professional world.

Because email is so prevalent, people tend to write emails as if they are conversations. Now many emails are conversations; the one with the brother-in-law about the game last night, or the …

But in the professional world, email should not be used to replace the conversation in the hallway or over the water cooler.

Why not? Because there are only so many of those conversations you can physically have in a day. But with email, there is no limit to how many you can receive. No-one has time for 50 hallway conversations in a day. They would never get any work done! But we can easily receive that many conversational emails in a day.

But how?

Emails need to present information concisely and in a really accessible format.

In reality, you should assume you have 10 seconds to get your most important message across to your audience.

You need to use the title and opening sentence of the email intelligently. I’m not suggesting you make it like a novel and make it suspenseful – the exact opposite. Make sure you get the main point of the email across in that title and opening sentence!

Want some tips on how to do that? Do our FREE mini-masterclass on writing emails.

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