Improve Your Productivity - email in 5 sentences or less

by Bill Schlack
For more information on this go to TechConnective.com

Try making every email 5 sentences or less. Sound hard? Try it. You will communicate more because people will read it all, pay better attention and understand more.

1. Your 5 sentences need to answer five simple questions.

• Who are you?
• What do you want?
• Why are you asking me?
• Why should I do what you're asking?
• What is the next step?

"This is exactly what an intelligent person needs to know to make a decision," according to successful serial entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki, author of APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur (Nononina Press, 2013) and managing director of the venture capital firm Garage Technology Ventures.


2. Trim to the critical details when you want to get a response.
Writ what you want the first time through. Then edit with a machete to what's critical. Do they need it to make a decision? Do you need it to make your decision? If not, it's fluff & fluff flies! How many unanswered emails do you have in your inbox? Roughly the same number that are filled with fluff. Trim the fluff to get the job done!


3. Shorter emails will help your reader stay focused.
When it's short it is harder to get off track and lost. This applies to both you in writing & your reader in reading, understanding and responding. Brief and clear gets a "right now" response accelerating getting the job done for everyone.



4. One way to shorten is to only cover one subject.
You can use bullet points but when you keep it focused on one subject, the recipient does not have to wait for a lingering answer to respond. This speeds up your process significantly.


5. Trim everywhere but PRAISE.
There is never enough praise going around. You can count on people to read it all & probably reread it for good measure. So be generous and detailed with praise. Reinforce exactly (and everything) that went well. It is often good to do this in an email that has nothing more

I wrote this after reading: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226581