What’s Irritating About E-mail?

In recent years I’ve polled hundreds of people about their work in the digital age. This week, it’s what’s irritating about e-mail?

When people:

• Give no greeting or sign-off
• Provide incomplete information
• Send messages that have typos and poor punctuation and sentence structures
• Put quotes or sayings in their signatures
• Expect a reply in five minutes
• Ask questions that can’t be answered in an e-mail and that require a phone call
• Sound cold or inhuman
• Write overly short, curt messages
• Send long e-mails or send long e-mail chains that I have to go back into to get context while they write, “What do you think?”
• Don’t reread their words to determine if the wrong unwritten message was sent
• Send e-mails with mixed topics
• Use subject lines that don’t reflect the e-mail’s content
• Repeatedly put in the subject line “Please read” or “Urgent”
• Don’t use the addressee’s name
• Forward e-mails without asking
• Don’t respond
• Send something important via e-mail that deserves a phone call instead
• Send an e-mail rather than having the courage to talk to me directly
• Type with bold, caps, wild fonts, or red text
• Sit close by but send an e-mail instead of getting up and stopping by my office to ask a question
• Give one-word answers to complicated e-mails
• Don’t bother to read the e-mail trail and respond blindly
• Send long e-mails without paragraphing
• Don’t include a phone number or any other optional contact information
• Lazily hit Reply all when individual, targeted responses are necessary
• Write in an emotional state
• Take a tone in written form they’d never take in person
• Write as if they were in an informal conversation instead of being engaged in business correspondence
• Use abbreviations and emoticons

Now that you are reminded, refrain from doing the above!