Great Email Time Savers for Busy Managers

 Writing skills are as important in electronic messages as in paper communication. Not everyone is skilled at writing emails or knows when email is required. Here are some tips to follow that will cut down time spent on writing emails:

1. Choose your recipients with care. Plan to send copies to only those people who absolutely need the message. 
2. To help recipients prioritize email, highlight in the subject header whether the email requires any type of action. For instance “New project proposal-For your review and approval” 
3. Avoid using CAPITAL LETTERS or writing your entire email using lowercase. CAPITAL LETTERS LOOKS LIKE SHOUTING and writing without standard capitalization inhibits the recognition of names, sentence beginnings, etc, which all depends on lower and upper case contrasts. 
4. For long emails, forecast its structure. Summarize your message and list the section headings. This helps the reader to scroll to sections they have an interest in. 
5. Use colours to highlight, but be careful of using reds and greens. Red and green colour blindness is common. 
6. Be conservative on the use of emoticons and acroynyms such as “LOL”, “TTYL” and [Symbol] .When in doubt, skip them altogether. 
7. Use formatting such as headings, white space, large fonts to help readers find the crux of your email fast. 
8. Attachment matters. Most of us have probably made the mistake of sending the email message out without including the attachment document. Try putting the attachment first then writing the text and include the recipients last. Doing this backwards works.