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9 Rules For Emailing From Google Exec
Eric Schmidt
Sept. 24, 2014
From “How Google Works” by Eric Schmidt
& Jonathan Rosenberg
Communication in the Internet
Century usually means using email, and email, despite being remarkably useful
and powerful, often inspires momentous dread in otherwise optimistic, happy
humans. Here are our personal rules for mitigating that sense of foreboding:
1. Respond
quickly. There are people who can be relied upon to respond promptly to
emails, and those who can’t. Strive to be one of the former. Most of the
best—and busiest—people we know act quickly on their emails, not just to us or
to a select few senders, but to everyone. Being responsive sets up a positive
communications feedback loop whereby your team and colleagues will be more
likely to include you in important discussions and decisions, and being
responsive to everyone reinforces the flat, meritocratic culture you are trying
to establish. These responses can be quite short—“got it” is a favorite of
ours. And when you are confident in your ability to respond quickly, you can
tell people exactly what a non-response means. In our case it’s usually “got
it and proceed.” Which is better than what a non-response means from most
people: “I’m overwhelmed and don’t know when or if I’ll get to your note, so if
you needed my feedback you’ll just have to wait in limbo a while longer. Plus I
don’t like you.”
2. When
writing an email, every word matters, and useless prose doesn’t. Be crisp in
your delivery. If you are describing a problem, define it clearly. Doing
this well requires more time, not less. You have to write a draft then go
through it and eliminate any words that aren’t necessary. Think about the late
novelist Elmore Leonard’s response to a question about his success as a writer:
“I leave out the parts that people skip.” Most emails are full of stuff that
people can skip.
3. Clean out
your inbox constantly. How much time do you spend looking at your inbox,
just trying to decide which email to answer next? How much time do you spend
opening and reading emails that you have already read? Any time you spend
thinking about which items in your inbox you should attack next is a waste of
time. Same with any time you spend rereading a message that you have already
read (and failed to act upon).
When you open a new message, you
have a few options: Read enough of it to realize that you don’t need to read
it, read it and act right away, read it and act later, or read it later (worth
reading but not urgent and too long to read at the moment). Choose among these
options right away, with a strong bias toward the first two. Remember the old
OHIO acronym: Only Hold It Once. If you read the note and know what needs
doing, do it right away. Otherwise you are dooming yourself to rereading it,
which is 100 percent wasted time.
If you do this well, then your inbox
becomes a to‑do list of only the complex issues, things that require deeper
thought (label these emails “take action,” or in Gmail mark them as starred),
with a few “to read” items that you can take care of later.
To make sure that the bloat doesn’t
simply transfer from your inbox to your “take action” folder, you must clean
out the action items every day. This is a good evening activity. Zero items is
the goal, but anything less than five is reasonable. Otherwise you will waste
time later trying to figure out which of the long list of things to look at.
4. Handle
email in LIFO order (Last In First Out). Sometimes the older stuff gets taken
care of by someone else.
5. Remember,
you’re a router. When you get a note with useful information, consider who
else would find it useful. At the end of the day, make a mental pass through
the mail you received and ask yourself, “What should I have forwarded but
didn’t?”
6. When you
use the bcc (blind copy) feature, ask yourself why. The answer is almost
always that you are trying to hide something, which is counterproductive and
potentially knavish in a transparent culture. When that is your answer, copy
the person openly or don’t copy them at all. The only time we recommend using
the bcc feature is when you are removing someone from an email thread. When you
“reply all” to a lengthy series of emails, move the people who are no longer
relevant to the thread to the bcc field, and state in the text of the note that
you are doing this. They will be relieved to have one less irrelevant note
cluttering up their inbox.
7. Don’t yell.
If you need to yell, do it in person. It is FAR TOO EASY to do it
electronically.
8. Make it
easy to follow up on requests. When you send a note to someone with an action
item that you want to track, copy yourself, then label the note “follow up.”
That makes it easy to find and follow up on the things that haven’t been done;
just resend the original note with a new intro asking “Is this done?”
9. Help your
future self search for stuff. If you get something you think you may want to
recall later, forward it to yourself along with a few keywords that describe
its content. Think to yourself, How will I search for this later? Then,
when you search for it later, you’ll probably use those same search terms. This
isn’t just handy for emails, but important documents too. Jonathan scans his
family’s passports, licenses, and health insurance cards and emails them to
himself along with descriptive keywords. Should any of those things go missing
during a trip, the copies are easy to retrieve from any browsers.
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In
addition to this blog, I have authored the premiere book on
Netiquette, "Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance
and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile, reviews of the
book and content excerpts at:
www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki
If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and PSG of Mercer County New Jersey.
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www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki
If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and PSG of Mercer County New Jersey.
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