Incoming Email Subject Lines, Ranked

Most Email is terrible. But some emails are actually fun to receive. Some. So for your day off from work/school/whatever it is that you have to worry about tomorrow but you are trying not to think about today reading pleasure, I submit this incomplete, yet definitive ranking of Incoming Email Subject Lines.

Here we go...

15. 'Whitepaper: 5 Tips for Managing Gen Y'

14. 'REMINDER: 'Your credit card payment is due in 5 days.'

13. 'You may already be a winner!'

12. <Subject: Blank>

11. 'It's time to check-in for your flight tomorrow.'

10. 'New comment on 'Easter Candies, Ranked'.'

9. 'Steve, please add me to your LinkedIn network.'

8. 'Up to 70% off for the Brooks Brothers clearance sale!'

7. 'Your Amazon.com order has shipped!'

6. 'New price drop on Las Vegas Hotels!'

5. 'Out of the Office: I am out of the office today...'

4. 'This meeting has been canceled, and removed from your calendar.'

3. 'ALERT: A Direct Deposit has been received into your account.'

2. 'Your upgrade on Flight 239 has been confirmed.'

1. 'You have no scheduled events today.'

Have a great Monday and for folks in the USA, a nice Memorial Day. Thanks to all the brave men and women who gave their lives in defense and service.

Notes from the Road #16 - ALL CAPS EDITION

Submitting this brief dispatch from Delta Flight 2316 to Las Vegas where I am heading to attend, cover, and moderate a session at the Health & Benefits Leadership Conference this week. For folks who might not know this, I live just outside of Rochester, NY, a fine place to live for many reasons, but like many mid-size cities in the US, suffers from a lack of direct flights to many popular destinations. It was this circumstance that had me on my first flight of the day - a 6:10AM early morning short hop to Detroit, where I caught the aforementioned flight to Vegas.

The flight from Rochester to Detroit is short, maybe an hour of total flight time. Add in a few minutes taxiing out and the total time for the flight might have clocked in at about 1:10 this morning. Thanks to the fine, fine folks at Delta, I was upgraded on ROC - DTW flight, in seat 2A. Seated next to me in 2B was your perfectly typical, perhaps stereotypical 'business guy sitting in first class' person. He had the look, the manner, the tech, (iPad and iPhone) of a corporate VP-type. Maybe in consulting, maybe in sales, hard to say for sure, but definitely someone pretty high on whatever food chain in which he resides.

So (finally) here's the point of the story. For the entire 1:10 minutes we were on the plane from ROC - DTW the guy in 2B wrote emails, starting on the iPhone, switching to the iPad once airborne, then back to the iPhone again once we landed. Non-stop email.  I mean not one minute he was not emailing. It was an impressive feat of email stamina.

But that was not the most interesting thing about the guy in 2B. Everyone one of his emails, at least every time that I snuck a peak to my right, was typed in ALL CAPS. EVERY EMAIL WAS IN ALL CAPS.

Insane, right?

Can you imagine being a person on the receiving end of one of Mr. VP's all caps emails that was sent from a plane at 6:05AM? I have to think anyone who received one of those this morning could not have been all that excited about that prospect.

Look, everyone knows that emailing in all caps is akin to shouting at someone, and you should never do it. But I think it indicates more than just bad email etiquette. It flags you as having just about no self-awareness, no understanding of what kind of impact you're having on folks, (especially if you are the boss, like I suspect Mr. 2B is). 

I couldn't not stop thinking about Mr 2B's staff when they fired up their email this morning. They had to have been hoping they'd have a quiet day, since 2B was on a 6:00AM flight and would not be around today to bug them. Instead, they likely received an ALL CAPS blast before they got their coffee.

Work can sometimes be a drag. In fact, it often can be a drag. It sometimes is hard to tell why. But guys like Mr. 2B are certainly not helping matters.

If you work for Mr. ALL CAPS guy I feel for you today. Hang in there.

Poker, dating, and responding to email - it's all about the timing

Good poker players will tell you, at least I am pretty sure they will tell you, that no matter if your cards are good, bad, or somewhere in between, that a smart player will respond and react to the betting action in a consistent manner. If you call or raise a bet too quickly or eagerly, that might be a 'tell' that you are holding some great cards and can't wait to get more money into the pot. Similarly, waiting and belaboring a decision to call a bet could signal a comparatively weak hand, and embolden your opponents.

So the smart play is to find and maintain a consistent rhythm or cadence to your reactions and decisions, good cards or bad, and eliminate at least one source of intelligence for the other players. Don't get too twitchy, don;t wait too long to move, and you maintain some control of both your emotions as well as the table.

I suppose the same argument could be made in dating where guys have, for pretty much forever, had to figure out how quickly to call after an initial meeting and exchange of phone numbers, or a positive first date. Call too soon then you come off too eager and possibly creepy. Wait too long to call back and you might send off a 'I'm not really interested' vibe that inadvertently could short-circuit the relationship from the beginning. So it's a tough call (no pun intended), figuring out the proper 'wait' interval for the call so that you don't screw it up or send the wrong message.

This kind of 'How long do I wait to react?' dilemma pops up in all kinds of workplace situations as well - in when to speak up in meetings, following up after a job interview, and particularly one that stands out for me, the 'How long do I wait to respond to this email?' conundrum.

Here's the scenario I want you to consider. You send an important'ish email to a colleague - maybe your boss or a sales or job prospect, not one of your direct reports, the idea being the person you emailed does not have any kind of 'expected response time' commitment to your emails. But you are eager for a response nonetheless. Then this person sits on your email for a bit. Maybe a day, maybe two, maybe even a week. Again, they don't really 'owe' you a reply in any specific timeframe, but they 'should' get back to you at some point. So a few days pass, let's say about six, then you finally get a reply back to the email that for which you've been eagerly waiting. 

And now the moment of truth, like the poker player having to decide how long to wait before pushing in your chips, you have to determine when to reply to the reply, to the message that you waiting six long days to receive. If you immediately hit back, say within a half hour of getting the message you are sending out a couple of signals that you may not really want to send. First, you come off as a little bit desperate or at least over eager. You waited six days to get a response and you're firing back in almost real-time. You may just be excited, but you also could appear weak. And second, and maybe this is just a hangup I have, you set yourself up as someone who is constantly, perhaps obsessively, monitoring your Inbox. Most productivity folks recommend checking and responding to emails a couple, maybe three times a day. Getting an immediate reply back tells me you never stop looking at your email.

So what is the 'right' or best way to mange this situation? 

Unless the subject matter is really urgent, or has some kind of hard deadline associated with it, I think you have to wait at least half as long to reply back than it took for you to get your original reply. So in our example if it took six days to hear back from your emailer, then you should be able to hold out for a couple, even three days to respond back. Waiting, at least a little, sends a couple of more positive messages. It shows you have other things going on besides waiting for that email. It shows that you took some time to actually think about your reply. And finally, it sort of but not quite evens the power dynamic between you and your correspondent.

So if you want to play the power game at the poker table of in your Inbox, take a little time before you re-raise and before you reply. You don't want to show what you're holding but acting too fast.

And to everyone waiting for an email reply back from me, I promise they are coming soon...

A feature that Email should steal from the DMV

In New York State, and I suspect in other places as well, when you visit a Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) office to get a new license, register your sailing vessel, or try to convince the nice bureaucrats that you did in fact pay those old parking ticket fines, there is generally a two-step process for obtaining services.

You first enter the office and wait in line to be triaged by a DMV rep, and once he/she determines the nature of your inquiry, you receive a little paper ticket by which you are assigned a customer number, and an estimated waiting time until you will be called by the next DMV agent. You then commence waiting until your number is announced and you can complete your business. 

That little bit of information, the estimated wait time, is the aspect of the DMV experience that I think has tons of potential for in other areas, most notably in Email communications. The DMV estimates your wait time, (I imagine), in a really simplistic manner. It is a function of the number of customers waiting ahead of you, the number of DMV agents available, and the average transaction time for each customer to be served. Simple math, and probably is pretty accurate most of the time.

The Email version of the 'Estimated Wait Time' function would be used to auto-reply to every (or selected) incoming email messages with a 'Estimated Response Time' that would provide the emailer with information about how long they should expect to wait before receiving a reply. 

How would this work, i.e., what would the 'Estimated Response Time' algorithm need to take into account? Probably, and at least the following data points.

1. The relationship between the sender and the recipient - how frequently emails are exchanged, how recent was the last exchange, and what has been the typical response time to this sender in the past

2. The volume of email needing action/reply in the recipient's inbox at the time the email is received, and how that volume level has impacted response times in the past

3. The recipient's calendar appointments (most email and calendar services are shared/linked), for the next 1, 3, 12, 24, etc. hours. Is the recipient in meetings all day? Going on vacation tomorrow? About to get on a cross-country flight in two hours?

4. The subject matter of the email, (parsed for keywords, topics mentioned in the message, attachments, etc.)

5. Whether the recipient is in the 'To' field or in the 'CC' field, whether there are other people in the 'To' and 'CC' fields, and the relationship of the recipient to anyone else receiving the email

And probably a few more data points I am not smart enough to think of in the 20 minutes or so I have been writing this.

The point?

That a smart algorithm, even a 'dumb' one like at the DMV, could go a long way to help manage communications, workflow, and to properly set expectations. When you send someone an email you (usually) have no idea how many other emails they just received that hour, what their schedule looks like, the looming deadlines they might be facing, and the 12,458 other things that might influence when/if they can respond to your message. But with enough data, and the ability to learn over time, the 'Expected Response Time' algorithm would let you know as a sender what you really need to know: whether and when you might hear back.

Let's just hope once the algorithm is in place, we all don't get too many "Expected Response Time = NEVER" replies.

Now please Google, or Microsoft, or IBM get to work on this.

SURVEY: Depressingly, Email remains the most important technology at work

One of my go-to places for news, data, and research on technology adoption, usage, and trends is the Pew Research Internet Project. Towards the end of 2014, the folks at Pew released a short research report titled Technology's Impact on Workers, a look at how and which kinds of technologies are effecting work and workforces. It is a pretty interesting and easily digestible report, but since I know you are really busy and might not have time to read the entire research report, I wanted to call out one data point, and then we can, together, pause, reflect, and lament for a moment.

First the data point, take a look at the chart below that displays survey responses to the question of which technologies workers (separated into office workers and non-office workers), consider 'very important' to their jobs:

Two things stand out from this data. First, and the obvious one (and still exceedingly depressing), is that email remains the most important type of technology cited by office workers for helping them perform their jobs. Despite its relative maturity (and that is putting it nicely, as far as technology goes, email at about 30 years old should have been brought out behind the barn and put out of its misery decades ago), email continues to hold its vise-like death grip on modern office work. I hope I live (or at least work) long enough to see email finally disrupted from this position, but so far alternate workplace communication and collaboration options have not been able to accomplish what (ironically), almost everyone desires - the end of being slaves to email all day.

The other bit of data from the Pew survey comes from the bottom portion of the chart - the kinds of technologies that workers find not 'very important' to them in getting their jobs done. And in a result that will make the social networking aficionados cringe (and many CIOs who would prefer to block these kinds of things from corporate networks happy), social networking sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook were cited as 'very important' by a measly 7 percent of office workers and 2 percent of non-office workers. Now that doesn't mean that these networks are 'not important', based on the way the question was phrased, but certainly the vast disparity in the stated importance of social networks in getting work done compared to email, (general) internet availability, and phones paints a pretty clear picture. For most folks, technology use at work is dominated by email, with web access and phones, (land and mobile), rounding out about 90% of the technology picture.

I will close with a quote from the Pew report, and then sulk away with my head bowed, dreaming of a better future for our children...

This high standing for email has not changed since Pew Research began studying technology in the workplace. Email’s vital role has withstood major changes in other communications channels such as social media, texting, and video chatting. Email has also survived potential threats like phishing, hacking and spam and dire warnings by commentators and workplace analysts about lost productivity and email overuse.

Ugh.

Happy Wednesday.