In a world where emails proliferate like tribbles (see original Star Trek) many of us find it difficult to get our message across and especially get people to respond how and when we’d like. With that said, email can be the fastest and most effective way to communicate. Phones are not quite dead, but almost (how long since you’ve checked your voicemail at work!). Text messaging hasn’t quite made it to the “over 40” crowd. And the art of conversation is all but dead. That leaves us with email.

I’ve seen a number of tactics used by people and SPAMers to get their point across in email. Most of these tactics are annoying and can be just plain obnoxious. Most people forget we have this little button called “DELETE”. If you get more than 30 emails in a day, and let’s face it, most of us do, then we are getting pretty good at hitting that delete key. In fact, statistics show that people take no more than 10 seconds to decide what to do with an email. The choices are:

• Read
• Delete
• Forward on to someone else
• Archive (same as delete)
• Save until later (which is usually never – see “delete”)

Think about that, you have less than 10 seconds to grab a reader’s attention. That’s not a lot of time (even in today’s fast paced world).

So here are Five Ways to Kill an Email or assure someone deletes, archives, or saves until “later”:

• Subject Line Suckage
• Chunky Peanut Butter Paragraphs
• CC or BCC
• TMI
• No Headings