Dare to dream !

I still remember the first time I started using email was about 13-15 years ago. At that time, most people didn’t know what is an email. A lot of things have changed and email has since become a very important medium of communication. And yet, there are still a lot of people who do not know how to use an email properly.

This explains why it's important to check and read your emails

I’m not talking about people from the older generation who are relatively new to such technology (well, my father who is in his 60s knows how to use an email properly). I’m talking about the professionals (even IT professionals) and executives in large corporations. You will be surprised that there are still some of them who do not know how to use their email properly. Here are some of the things I’ve observed.

• You’ve sent out an email containing information about the company’s annual dinner including time, location (with a map), etc. You even highlighted the important things with bold, red color and underlined them. And yet, there are still a lot of people who are asking you for details – details on the time, location, and other things which have been mentioned.
• You sent out an email to a group of employees to inform them of about an event. You’ve put a “voting” option at the top of the email in order to allow them to reply a “Yes, I’m attending”  or “No, I’m not attending”. However, 80% of the responses are coming in the form of email reply. And the replies are being sent to everyone in the list. So the whole list of employees (can be more than 10, or more than 100), will be receiving tonnes of emails saying “Yes, count me in” or “No, I have a dinner appointment with my fiance’s family”.
• People forwarding chain mails to you because of 2 things – your email is in his address book, and he is afraid to get cursed if he doesn’t forward the chain/curse mail.
• Your friends/colleagues sending invitations to some unknown competitions without your permission, just so that they stand a better chance of winning the competition themselves.
• Team members or colleagues sending HIGH PRIORITY emails to you even though the contents are not really that important. Their HIGH PRIORITY might not be your HIGH PRIORITY.
• People sending emails to you in difficult to read font (too small, too big, too fancy font type, etc) because they want to be artistic or creative.
• Your team member uses your name in an email to the client just to cover his own ass. “According to Alvin, this is something which should not be done.”
• You figure that it’s good to go straight to the point in an email. In fact, it IS good. But the next thing you know, your colleagues from another country started to complain to your bosses that you are very rude in the email. Different culture, different mindset and different way to communicate. An email way of communication should not be associated to a normal form of communication.
• And the worst one of them all. You sent out an email to inform some of your colleagues about the new changes made by the income tax department. Some idiots started to give their personal opinions and chat happily in the email….sending those nonsense emails to everyone in the list.

I can really go on and on and on about such incidents. It’s funny how such common mistakes can be made by people who have been using emails for many many years – and some of the people who I’ve met are from IT industry. Remember that having my email address does not give you the permission to spam me or to send nonsense stuff to me.

Do it more often, and your emails will end up in my junk folder.

P/S….. Maybe someone should really come out with some online guides to teach people (especially professionals and executives), on how to use email properly, though I doubt any of them will be willing to put down their ego and read such guides.