emendatio

How often have you clicked on the SEND button within Outlook and in the very second you clicke you noticed that you made a mistake. Maybe you forgot the attachment, misspelled a word in the subject or put your boss on CC instead of your best work buddy?

I’ve been through all of these and I’d like to show you how Outlook Rules can help you avoid these situations. We will set up a rule that will “defer” emails from leaving your outbox after clicking the SEND button for some minutes.

Go to Tools in the menu bar, Rules and Alerts. There will a small window open up, click on New Rule.

Under “Start from a blank rule” (at the bottom of this list), choose Check messages after sending, and then click Next.

Click the Next button again on the “Which conditions do you want to check” screen. Another window will pop up with this dialog informing you that the rule will apply to all messages. You can also set this rule up to only work for certain people or groups.

On the next screen, check the box for “defer delivery by a number of minutes“, and then click on “a number of“. Change the defer minutes to something like 5 minutes (after a while I changed mine to 3 minutes, 5 minutes is way too long).

Click the Next button, and then give the rule a name, mine is “Don’t send out stupid emails!”

That’s it, you’re all set. When you click on the Send button right now, you will notice that the emails will stay in your Outbox for the specified number of minutes. Please note that when you edit an email within the Outbox (e.g. by double clicking on it) you will have to click the Send button again, otherwhise it will stay in the Outbox forever.

Reblogged from the Howtogeek Blog.

Ever wondered what’s the most important skill in your daily business is, no matter whether you’re a construction worker, a lawyer or a sales guy like me: its listening! Listening to your customers, your colleagues, your boss and even your belly. Now you might say that these are different kinds of listening skills, but I dare to say they are not. Listening is so very important as it maximizes effectiveness of aural business communication, no matter who you’re talking, err listening to.

Why is listening so vitally important for good communication? Because we think at a much faster rate than we listen. Which means that although we might listen to someone talking to us, our mind is working on the words it is processing on a much faster rate. Our brain will take whatever word it hears and construct new words, ideas and thoughts around this. Very often we tend to literally get lost inside this process and stop listening and following the conversation. Therefore listening is not only about asking the right questions, but more importantly about stopping yourself from “thinking too fast” and forcing yourself to focus on the conversation.

The best way to stop yourself from dwelling away is practicing it. Whenever you are in a conversation and you notice that your thoughts are drifting, force yourself to stop. You can only think about one thing at the same moment, therefore you have to focus. The lifecoaches blog suggest the following little exercise to train this ability:

Take a moment and think about where you would like to go on your next vacation. What would you like to do? How much fun would you have? Okay, so you got the dream vacation? Now, what do you have to accomplish at work or home tomorrow? What did you notice took place when you went from thinking about your dream vacation to work or home? What happened in your mind? Did you switch gears from vacation to work? You were so focused on creating that dream vacation and then you easily began focusing on work or home. This exercise is what we must practice when having conversations with people. It will help us to stay focused on what the individual is saying.

This will be the first and most important skill for improving your listening skills. Force yourself to focus on what’s being said, focus on not letting your mind drift away. In a next step you should fine-tune your listening skills, here are a few methods how to do it:

1. Learn to “listen ahead”: By “listening ahead”, trying to anticipate where a discussion is leading to, during the dialogue, determining the conclusion in advance of your required response allows you to relax and improve information absorption. This might sound contrary to what I’ve said above, but it means that your mind should focus on the conversation, not on anything else.
2. Learn to periodically validate communicated information: By mentally striving to validate the accuracy and completeness of information points made by the prospect, especially during pauses in the dialogue, (which can be achieved with note taking), you can allow yourself to absorb more information easier, especially information forthcoming in the continued dialogue.
3. Utilize “Active Listening” techniques: By periodically, mentally summarizing the major points communicated by the prospect and voicing, reaffirming your interpretation of the points made back to the prospect you add a tremendous amount of clarity to the information exchanged thus far.
Strive to understand versus “Judging”: By working to consciously understand what the prospect is saying versus the natural tendency of judging - approving or disapproving what is said will allow you to absorb what is actually said more than any other listening development technique.
4. Use your eyes to “get the rest of the story”: By listening with your eyes, paying attention to the prospect’s body language, their nonverbal facial and body movements or hand gestures you can see what the whole body is trying to tell you, not just the mouth!
5. Maintain a mental repertoire of common responses: By mentally developing and rehearsing how you are going to strategically respond to common sales prospect purchase objections, for example, in advance of a sales call, allows you to listen more effectively. A comprehensive mental inventory of common responses will also give you more confidence in any selling situation.

Listening is the most effective way to build trust, establish a strong relationship, maximize your time by properly disqualifying dead end opportunities and protecting your own and your company’s resources. When you listen with interest, you encourage communication. This allows another person to open up to you. If they feel safe, they will trust you. Encourage communication by showing interest in what someone shares with you by nodding when they speak. You don’t have to agree. You’re just showing that you’re listening. Don’t interrupt when someone is speaking just so that you can have your turn.

Good listening skills are directly connected to good questioning skills. I will talk about them in one of the next posts here. Meanwhile I’d like to recommend googling for more information on listening skills, there are tons of stuff on the intertubes.

Have you heard, read (here or here) of or even installed the new Xobni plugin for MS Office? If not better hurry and do so because Xobni brings some nice features Outlook itself is missing. It installs as a fifth column (depending on your interface layout) and instantly starts scanning your mailbox. It took 25 minutes to scan all my mails and archives, giving you a nice coffee break. When you click on a mail the Xobni column will display a graphical overview on the frequency of your conversation with the respective person. The search function in my oppinion is a bit better and faster than the built in Outlook search engine.

As you can see on the image above, you even get the chance to insert a picture per person. You can call the person directly, the embedded skype links works great, send a new email or plan a meeting. Below this box you will find a list of people this person is connected to, a list of your most recent conversations and files you exchanged. While this is mostly just eyecandy especially the "Files exchanged with …" box is really helpful when you’re looking for that last excel sheet that your colleague send and you saved, well, somewhere.

Way more powerfull and a real productivity improvement tool are the analytic capabilities of Xobni. It tracks all your inoming and outgoing emails and calendar entries, collects all data and timestamps and puts it together and summarizes it.

On the screenshot aboice you can see an analysis of the mail traffic in my inbox. Well beside the obvious information about my starting time, lunch and the time I’m going home this gives a pretty good idea on my responsive behavior. But it gets even better, Xobni analytics also tracks your respone time, meaning how fast and often you respond to emails at what time of the day.

Looking at this information gives you a very good idea on how your behavior towards your inbox changes during the day. I noticed for myself that the respond time in the afternoon is a lot longer than in the morning. I spend some time investigating this and found out that most of the time I get the real "hard stuff", the mails that need the most effort, are send to me right after lunch. As I am usually a bit tired after eating this would be contra productive: beeing sleepy at the most heavy work of the day. I therefore moved my lunch break to 11am to be fit for work at 1pm.

I think there are still many ways to improve the analysis tool and way more data to track. I’d personally like to see how fast which person respons to my emails, what is the word ratio between send and received emails, how similar are the responses to my outgoing emails? It might also be a nice idea to get a graphical idea on the entire CC situation in your inbox: who also receives emails you get and how close are you to this person, do you also reply to him/ her, does he/ she send emails as well or only receives them?

One last thing I’d like to add, the improvement part of course. I would love to have the Xobni column as a widescreen row below the regular outlook interface. I can’t help it but the column is stealing way too much space on my screen. The second thing deals with memory usage. Since I’ve installed Xobni I noticed a small performance decrease in Outlook: it boots a bit slower and the indexing of long and complex emails often slows the entire machine.

Nevertheless Xobni is a fantastic tool and a lot more than just eye candy. If you use to track information, emails and contacts it will greatly improve your working speed with emails. Check out the website for some video intros.

Link: Xobni

I wanted to write on this topic for quite a while now, mainly because I love the term Email Ninja. If you, like me, work in a huge company and in a position with a lot communication coming in and going out you may know the problem of an overwhelming inbox.

Leo Babauta, author of the Zen Habits blog gives a beautiful list of things to do to become an Email Ninja. I tried all of these advices over the last few weeks and I can’t praise them enough. Follow these rules and you will definitely get your grip on your inbox. Let me give you a short example by quoting his rule # 8:

Be liberal with the delete key. Too often we feel like we need to reply to every email. But we don’t. Ask yourself, “What’s the worst that will happen if I delete this?” If the answer isn’t too bad, just delete it and move on. You can’t reply to everything. Just choose the most important ones, and reply to them. If you limit the emails you actually reply to or take action on, you get the most important stuff done in the least amount of time. Pareto and all that.

Link: Leo Babauta - 10 Steps to Become an Email Ninja

Scott Young gives us another 7 bad email habits that make people want to kill you. I agree to all seven moints and would like to emphasize two major points: the buried question and the urgent request paragraph.

The problem with buried questions within emails is the fact, that the people writing these mails often don’t notice their mistakes or do this on purpose. With my colleagues at work I always have to the problem, that they don’t state a clear question but give me like 10 lines of useless text with a tiny question hidden inside. With 20 of these emails in a row it’s quite hard to focus on the main point. A few times it has also happened to me that people hid questions they felt uncomfortable with, in longer paragraphs/ lines. While reading I felt the unsecureness and fear to put the question straight. My advice here is: always communicate straight and clear and do the same with questions. If you want a fast, clear and understandable answer from me I expect you to ask in the same way!

My second issue are the urgent requests. I really don’t understand people who send urgent requests to me via email. We spoke quite a few time about the fact, that email is an asynchronous medium and therefore the requirements for an instant reply are often not given. Remember: email is NOT chat. If something is really important or you have an urgent request, just call me or if you’re in a situation where cou can’t talk use any instant messaging protocol. In most companies interal IM clients are used or ppl. get connected through skype, icq, msn etc.

Link: Scott H. Young - 7 bad email habits that make people want to kill you

The Lifeclever blog published an interesting article by Will Chen, mainly focusing on freelancers and web2.0 startups, on how to attract and manage novice clients. Most of the items he addresses I would call common knowledge but I know from my personal experience that too often they’re not. Will gives advice on how to deal with customers who have no idea what they want and describs how to convince them with your expertise and portfolio.

The most interesting fact of the article is the fact, that I can easily adapt all of the points to my own business working as a Sales Specialist for an IT company. Although my job has nothing to do with visual design I have to sell products to (new) customers every day. The bottom line is: understand your customer. And therefore always keep in mind the one and only true sales rule (because it comes at hand whenever you deal with any customer, whenever you’re in a sales role): “First seek to understand, than to be understood.” It’s all about

Link: Lifeclever - How to attract and manage novice clients

In Bert Deckers blog I found a list of great thoughts on communication he got from Nido Qubein - “one of the best communicators out there” as he calls him. Read each of the following points and you’ll notice that all can be applied to everyday and business communication.

• Competence leads to confidence.
• Don’t interrupt, but be interruptible.
• Leave every person feeling better for having talked to you — they’ll be happy to see you next time.
• Say what you mean, precisely what you mean, and only what you mean.
• When you’re thinking ahead, you can’t hear what’s being said.
• Forget your ability to think faster than another person talks — everybody has it, but only the foolish use it.
• Listen at least twice as much as you talk — others will hear twice as much of what you say.
• It’s our enemies from whom we learn the most.
• Talking when nobody is listening is as futile as trying to cut paper with half a pair of scissors.
• If you create tension, you get resistance. If you create trust, you get response.
• Objections are what symptoms are to the medical doctor. They point to a problem that must be dealt with.
• Personal communication is hindered by hasty assumptions.
• Self-centered people tend to monopolize the talking. Secure people tend to monopolize the listening.
• You’re wasting your time when you try to answer questions people are not asking.
• A “monologue in duet” happens when I think up what I’m going to say while you’re saying what you thought up while I was talking.
• With life-long education, learning becomes a renewable resource.
• Make it a habit to say nice things about yourself, to yourself. You’ll find that you like yourself better.
• The key to your success is to be sensitive enough to understand what other people want, and generous enough to help them get it.
• Pay attention to others and they will pay attention to you.
• Be interesting by being interested.
• The genius who can’t communicate is intellectually impotent.
• The leader who can’t communicate can’t create the conditions that motivate.
• The organization that can’t communicate can’t change, and the corporation that can’t change is dead.

We all write emails. Every day. Every hour. When you start your computer at work every morning very often your “new email count” goes double, sometimes trible figures. From that huge amount of email you have to select the most important mails, urgent tasks and followups. This process often consumes precious work tim and is caused by the many mistakes you can do while writing an email.
I have no solution for you right now how to deal with this problem in your own inbox (except a ‘move all email to the deleted items folder’) but I can show you some advices how to set a good example and at least improve your receipients productivity.

In July I read an article of Mike Davidson on email overload where he stated that one of his main concerns is the asynchronus communication in email:

[...] But with email, often times the sender will ask two or three open-ended one sentence questions which elicit multi-paragraph answers. In these cases, the sender spends one minute and the receiver is asked, implicitly, to spend maybe an hour.

He suggested the “5 sentences policy” where you force yourself to keep email responses to five sentences or less.

Very often you don’t only respond to emails but have to start new threats as well. Wired’s How To Wiki published a very nice guide on how to write a perfect email. The guide gives hints on brevity, context and layout and should definitely be read by anybody using email as a tool at work.

Links:

• five.sentenc.es
• Mike Davidson: A Low-Fi Solution to E-Mail Overload: Sentenc.es
• Wired How To Wiki: Write A Perfect Email