Page 18 - Today’s Business Communication; A How-to Guide for the Modern Professional

WhY MUST I READ ThIS BOOk AND FOLLOW YOUR ADvICE 7

employees had deleted as far back as 2006. Wow. First, think about all of
the emails you’ve sent this year. Now imagine all the emails you’ve written
since 2006. Would each one pass legal scrutiny in a court of law? Probably
not. But in business they really need to be able to pass such close consid-
eration. Ms. Gambardella’s advice on the matter: train your mind to think
first, before writing a single line of a single email.
During her remarks, Ms. Gambardella also advised her audience to
have company policies regarding email use and, if you’re a manager, make
sure those policies are implemented and monitored; and, if your employ-
ees violate your email policies, you, as a manager, must enforce appropri-
ate penalties. Better to take disciplinary action against the policy violators
than to engage expensive legal services to defend yourself and your firm
against a lawsuit.
15
Think about whether that email you’re about to send is really nec-
essary. Each day, new M.B.A. hires exchange approximately 200 email
messages. The average worker spends 650 hours writing more than
16
41,000 words in emails each year. In addition, the average worker
17
attends 62 meetings per month. And sometimes we check email while
18
attending meetings. We multitask despite the negative effects on our
productivity. Put simply, we are busy.
19

Time and Time Again

We are all bombarded by emails begging for our attention. As a result,
we aren’t able to pay attention to everything, either because there aren’t
enough hours in the day or we don’t have enough interest to stay fully
engaged. Therefore, the reality is that some emails get buried in our
inboxes, while we delete or ignore others because either the sender or the
subject line doesn’t pass a cursory “so what?” test.
Although fewer people wear wristwatches today than in the recent
past, because we rely on smartphones for the time, why don’t you try to
imagine you are wearing a watch? Next, pretend that the watch has been
making a loud ticking sound all day. You probably have not—if you are
lucky—noticed every loud tick that your watch has sent to your brain.
Why not? Well, to get through the day, we pay more attention to things
that matter to us.