Scott H Young

E-mail is a shallow way to communicate. It’s easy, fast and lacks the depth of understanding most people have face-to-face. Unfortunately, many people don’t realize just how much of this understanding is lost. As a result, they pick up bad habits and start driving coworkers, bosses and friends crazy.

Here are seven particularly bad habits, and how you can fix them so people don’t want to kill you:

1) Hanging Questions

Any e-mail that involves a request or question requires a follow-up. Even something as short as, “K.” However some people seemed to have missed this point, and leave requests or small questions completely unanswered. The problem here is that the sender has no idea whether you even read the message yet.

Here’s the fix:

1. For small questions, answer them immediately after reading. Get an auto-responder or simply shorten e-mails to a few words if you’re facing a time-crunch.
2. For questions you can’t answer yet, tell them that. If you won’t know until the 15th, don’t wait until the 16th to reply.
3. For difficult or long-winded answers, tell them you aren’t sure/don’t have time to answer right now. If the message is important add writing a response to your to-do list. If it isn’t, just leave it there. Any response is better than silence.

2) Buried Requests

A buried request is where the question or actionable information is sandwiched between unimportant info. Consider the difference between these two e-mails:

Hi Bob, I’ve been considering your new proposal for adjusting the customer service policy. I think we should meet up and talk about it. Your proposal seems actionable, but I have a few concerns.

Compare to…

Hi Bob, I’ve been considering your new proposal for adjusting the customer service policy. I think we should meet up and talk about it. Your proposal seems actionable, but I have a few concerns.

When do you want to meet up?

In the first e-mail, the request is in the second sentence, buried away. In the second it is repeated and given a new paragraph. Which one do you think is easier to read?

3) Wrong Medium

E-mail works best for direct and non-time sensitive information. Conversations, discussions and anything that requires a heavy amount of back-and-forth should be done on the phone or in person. Trying to use e-mail to have these conversations can be slow, time-consuming and painful.

The solution is to bridge the e-mail gap when you recognize you’re wasting time with it. Ask the person if you can discuss the issues in person or on the phone at a specific time and date.

4) Trying to Be Clever

Don’t try to be witty or sarcastic in an e-mail and pretend as if everything you say will be taken literally. Although a few metaphors can come across well in an e-mail, most don’t. The person on the other side can’t tell with what intensity or emphasis you typed the words. If anything can be ambiguous, reword it and leave it out.

And don’t think using emoticons gives you the green-light to be clever and charming. A symbol can’t replace the hundreds of different varieties in voice, tone and gestures you normally use to communicate intentions.

5) Sending Urgent Requests Through E-Mail

My guideline is that I shouldn’t send an e-mail if I need a response in less than five days. Not only do some people take days to respond to e-mails, you won’t be able to convey urgency in text. When you are on the phone or in person, you can transmit the impending need of your request, while in text you can only resort to using CAPITAL LETTERS or exclamation marks!

6) Bulky Paragraphs

People don’t read e-mails, they skim. So don’t write an eight sentence paragraph in one chunk. Here’s some guidelines:

• More than six lines? Split it up.
• Important information? Make it a one-line paragraph.
• Multiple pieces of important information? Make a quick bulleted list. (Like this one)

7) Playing E-Mail Tag

This probably won’t bother other people, but it might make you stressed enough to take it out on yourself. Don’t try to keep your inbox open to receive e-mails immediately as they arrive. Set times each day to answer and keep yourself by those limits. It will reduce distractions and force people who want to banter to pick up the phone and call you.

Do you find yourself studying and then, when the test date comes, you end up drawing a blank? You understand the concepts, but little details just seem to leak out of your brain. You can remember studying them, but the knowledge they contain leads to a dead end.

I would separate academic learning into two categories: holistic and memorization. With holistic you are striving for the big picture, you “get” the subject. With memorization you need the details: facts, dates, terms and specific patterns. Both are important.

I Wasn’t Born with a Steel Trap

I’ve always been good with holistic learning. Understanding concepts, linking them together and finding metaphors or visualizations has always been easier for me. This ability can help with remembering facts, but it also made my memorization skills weaker as I used them infrequently.

After a great deal of research and experimentation I’ve been able to build a steel trap even if I wasn’t donated one at birth. Now I’m confident I can memorize any information I can’t integrate holistically. Here’s how you can overcome a leaky brain too:

Crucial Idea: Know What You Won’t Remember

Memorization isn’t that difficult. You’ve probably picked up some of your own techniques to remember facts. The problem is memorization can take time and you don’t know what you’ll forget!

The key to memorizing effectively, therefore, is to read while being sensitive to what information you are likely to forget. Knowing your own weaknesses is crucial, otherwise you’ll waste a lot of time studying material you didn’t learn properly the first time.

If, for example, I encounter a list of dates, places or facts, I can be aware that just reading won’t be enough to store this. When this happens I can switch modes and start encoding the information so it has a reasonable chance of surviving until the test date.

Memorization Tips

Here are some different techniques I use to help store information. Find a few you like and practice them. For the anything you encounter that won’t fit into one of these methods, your alternative is simply to repeat it enough times that it will stick. Brute force is an inefficient, but sometimes effective solution.

1) Link or Peg

One of my favorites is the link technique. The ideas behind this are fairly simple:

• We remember in associations.
• We are more likely to remember uncommon rather than ordinary details.

What would you be more likely to remember seeing, a picture of a flower or a picture of a purple elephant riding a unicycle on a tightrope? The link technique makes use of these two facts and allows you to store large lists with this method.

The link technique has three basic steps:

Step One - Convert Data to Images

Convert all data you need to memorize into images as this is the only type of information that can be encoded. In a management class I memorized Henri Fayol’s ten principles of management. But since they were all abstract ideas, I first had to convert them into symbols. “Division of labor” was represented as a knife cutting things apart.

Step Two - Exaggerated Linking

The next step is to form mental images that combine each base image in a ridiculous fashion. To link “division of labor” with “unity of command” I took the base images (cutting knife, hand pointing in a commanding fashion) and combined them. The resulting image was a giant hand with tiny knifes chopping it into segments. The more ridiculous the mental image, the stronger the link.

Step Three - Run Through and Test

The final step is simply to close your source and mentally run through the list. Any weak links should be replaced with more memorable imagery. Any weak symbols, or places that you can’t convert the image back to data, need to be re-examined.

2) Compression

The next method of memorizing is to compress information into a single source. Then from the source point you can easily reference individual facts associated with them. This is used in statistics all the time as graphs or charts compress down the information of a data table.

I tend use mostly pictures when compressing information. My notebook is filled with doodles I use to connect ideas together in a visual format. They usually look awful and lack artistic quality, but that isn’t the point. The point is to draw something quickly that can serve as a compression point for multiple ideas.

Another example from my management class, I compressed the information of Michael Porter’s five-forces model by making it the five horsemen of the business apocalypse. Then I drew quick sketches of each of the five horsemen (30-45 seconds each) and the mental image remains.

3) Blunt Force

When creative techniques like the ones mentioned above failed, the best solution is to use blunt force. The best way to use blunt force techniques is to test yourself. This way you can make sure that your efforts to fill knowledge into your head aren’t being wasted.

In a history class I needed to memorize maps of Ancient India, China, Japan and Southeast Asia. My solution was to trace a copy of the map with numbers instead of the place names and a key I stored on the reverse of the page. Then I just tested myself repeatedly for a half hour until I could get every one right without looking at the key.

Memorization Shouldn’t Compensate for a Lack of Understanding

In my free e-book, Holistic Learning, I talk about how it is basically the opposite of rote memorization. Learning through linkages and a broad understanding instead of through force. Holistic learning accounts for a good 70% of school-based learning and 90% real life learning. It shouldn’t be neglected just because you can memorize numbers.

I always strive to see if there is a holistic solution first, and only failing that, do I look for a way to memorize it. A great example of this is formulas in science. Someone who has memorizing abilities might just encode the formula. But this is inferior to actually going through the formula, understanding where it comes from and relating it to other concepts.

This way you actually “get” the formula instead of just having it memorized. And when you understand how information fits into your web of knowledge that understanding has far more usefulness than any memorization.