I Am Failing At... Email!

I Am Failing At… Email!

Email, Email, Email, Email, Email, Email, Email, Email!!!

Time to rewrite the book on email usage for me and this completely down to me failing badly at answering email in a sensible amount of time. Ironically you probably have the reverse of this  problem and are addicted to answering email in nano-seconds.

Failure is OK, but not recognising it and then not doing anything about is insanity.

Quick Background

One of my tasks for last week was to reach out to those I felt were “fab” and tell them so. Trust me I got some odd replies, however one was Chris Ducker from virtualbusinesslifestyle.com.

I’m not going to include what I wrote and only part of his reply, put it this way I’d have not replied to it and credit to the chap, he did.

This was his reply:

Hi Matthew

[content here]

Thanks again, and stay tuned – lots of great stuff coming up!!! :-)

C

————————————————————-
Q: Why is this email 3 sentences or less?
A: Click here to find out!
————————————————————-

Chris C. Ducker
Virtual CEO
@chriscducker

The main contents of the reply is irrelevant to this article, what is, is in the link here:
http://www.virtualbusinesslifestyle.com/my-three-sentence-rule/

Quote:

The Solution
Although receiving and replying to email is an important part of my business, I feel it should not BE my business. So, I now treat all email from this blog like SMS text messages from friends. Since it’s too hard to count and limit myself to a number of letters, I simply count sentences instead.

The maximum of three sentences.

What I am Now Doing?

Anything has to be better than what I am doing & where I’m at now with email (which is a backlog & a mess).

I have been failing badly and this may actually work! So if you get three sentences in a reply, you now know why and who’s responsible.

Image source

3 replies
  1. Rob Cubbon
    Rob Cubbon says:

    I’ve received an email from Chris Ducker and I was impressed with his “3 sentence rule”. The busier you became the more creative you need to be to cut your tasks down to a minimum. We’re all struggling with this issue and I think this is a great idea of how to cope. (It also increases traffic!)

    Reply
    • Matthew Ogborne
      Matthew Ogborne says:

      Howdy Rob,

      Yea, you mentioned his 3 sentence rule. pretty neat idea, so I’m nicking it.

      Getting most covered in 3 or less, however some by their nature are long.

      10 minutes to a clear inbox here!

      Matt

      Reply

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  1. I Am Failing At… Email!: Email, Email, Email, Email, Email, Email, Email, Email!!!
    Time to rewrit… http://t.co/8F4VPci @lastdropofink

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