Monthly Archives: March 2012

3 Ways to Get People to Read Your Emails

We all send and receive a lot of emails. What makes you read one email over another? And how do you increase the chances of your recipients actually reading your emails?

Meaningful Subject Lines
Please do not send any more emails with subject lines of “Re: Re: Re” or “<no subject>” or “Hey” or other meaningless terms and phrases.  The subject line is like the headline of an article — your article — make it lively and relevant!  Put in the essentials:

  • Project or Topic or Event email is referring to
  • Any action required? Is this a FYI (meeting minutes) or a “Please review” or “Your Approval needed by 5pm”
  • Add a few at-a-glance key terms that summarize the gist of the email

Examples:

  • DB2 Migration 5/2 Dev Mtg Mins: Action items for Jack and George by 5/8
  • FYI- Agile Training Vendor Vetting Session Findings
  • PCI Audit Review: We passed audit but 5 major asap items for 8/1 follow up mtg
  • Free ice cream at Corner Deli on 49th and 5th from now till 6p – coupon attached

Use Bullet Points
The email is not your great American novel or the draft of your speech. Watch out for long sentences and heavy paragraphs and extraneous words.  Get to the point in under 5 seconds! Try to keep your email above the fold, or at least keep the important details on the top, like the lede in a news story or the thesis in a term paper.  Put the action item assignments in the beginning of the email and leave the minutes and other FYI details lower in the page.

Add Links to your Emails
If your email is referencing an event or a project update or some news topic or vendor findings, and you are asking for feedback and opinions, then please add some links! Don’t write some three paragraph email about a subject and expect your reader to go searching in the intranet or internet for the relevant sites.  Throw in the links to the project wiki, the latest project schedule, the vendor website, the vendor’s API site, the event site, or links to white papers or wikipedia pages about the research topic.   If you don’t, chances are, the reader will not get around to doing this research and you will never get the feedback you requested.

 

Hello world!

This is the default title set by WordPress. Why “Hello World”, you ask?  Every programmer’s first assignment is to write a “Hello World” program. It is the easiest and uses the most basic function in any given language: the print statement. It’s a way of saying, “Hi!”

In Ruby, it is puts "Hello World!";
In PHP, it is echo "Hello World!";
In VisualBasic, it is Console.WriteLine ("hello world!")
In SQL, I suppose it may be SELECT "Hello World!" from TABLE
In Javascript, it is document.write("<b>hello world!</b>");
In ColdFusion, it is <cfoutput>Hello World!</cfoutput>
In Perl, it is print "Hello World. n";
In Java, it is System.out.println ("hello world!");
In C, it is printf ("hello world! n");
In Pascal, it is writeln("Hello World!");
In Turing, it is put "Hello World"

(A long while back, I used to write code for work.  This is in order of the latest language learned to the earliest language learned. Regrettably, I do not remember most of the syntax of any of these languages though I have a fondness for Pascal and can still do some JS.  I learned Ruby for an interview last summer and funny enough, I actually passed the tech interview and landed the job for a Ruby developer/tech lead role.  But I didn’t take it — I don’t see myself programming fulltime anymore. I leave that to the passionate hackers and experts out there.)