Most of us waste a lot of time on email, leaving less room to handle actually important work tasks. As productivity and ideas blog the 99u points out, you can quickly minimise the number of emails you send by avoiding any responses that don’t add value.
The 99u makes the point effectively:
Before you send a reply, ask yourself: are you responding just to reply, to show you’re paying attention, or just to say “thanks?” If so, you’re typically wasting time that could be spent producing something of value and only encouraging people to respond, thus adding more email to your inbox.
While it might seem impolite, most people get “thank you” emails and instantly delete them, hardly giving them a thought at all. If you can move past the courtesies of speech and treat email as a tool rather than a complex conversation, you can bypass a lot of the busywork you create for yourself through your inbox.
How Effective People Handle Email [The 99u]
Comments
One response to “Always Add Value When Replying To Email”
Because, you know, f^% courtesy!
I rarely reply just to say thanks, but there are definitely occasions where it is warranted – where someone was responded to you particularly quickly or if your request has caused a lot of work for them to respond or if it has inconvenienced them.
Nothing wrong with being polite and acknowledging someone’s efforts