Is Anybody Out There?

Never mind what the perfectionists and amateur English teachers would have you believe; grammar and punctuation aren’t even close to being the biggest problems in writing today. I have no doubt that the number one problem people have with their writing is simply getting someone else to read it. I’m not talking about selling that novel you’ve been working on since college. I mean just getting your coworkers to take the time to read the business email you send them at work. The speed and ubiquity of communications today have made it extremely difficult to get and keep anyone’s attention.

Part of my job as a training manager is to send out announcements about upcoming training. Some of it is for routine stuff, like the 300th Excel class we’ve offered for the year, but some of it is considerably more important and has a direct impact on the way we practice law. We recently rolled out a metadata scrubber, for example, that is designed to help protect us from unwittingly sending out sensitive information that can be concealed within the documents we create for clients and share with opposing counsel. Ultimately, we bought it to help avoid being sued. So when it came time to roll it out to our users we sent our typical training notice, but we also sent out other information that included references to articles about the dangers of metadata and stories from The Wall Street Journal about how other firms had gotten into trouble by sharing hidden metadata. This was important stuff. It seemed to me that this was exactly the sort of topic attorneys should be interested in and that we were doing a great job of promoting the training. But out of approximately 150 attorneys in our San Francisco office, we had exactly one show up. Pretty sad, but typical.

Another frustrating problem that I often encounter is that we send out announcements that we will be rolling out a new product, conduct the training for the few people who manage to make it, and then I start to hear complaints once people notice the new application on their computers. “What is this thing?” they demand. “Why weren’t we offered training!” (There’s often a “hell”, “damned” or worse thrown in there somewhere). One of the nice/scary things about email is that it keeps track of everything you do. So I can go into my Sent Items while I still have the caller on the phone and pull up the training announcement that we sent to all of our users. “The first training announcement went out on November 2nd, and there were two more after that,” I can tell them. “Would you like me to forward you a copy?” When I can tell them the date we sent it, they don’t usually ask for a copy. What usually does happen after that causes me endless despair.

“Oh, I don’t read email that comes from you,” they’ll say. Sometimes they substitute “trainers” or “IT” for “you.” This really doesn’t make me feel any better.

But it’s hard to blame people. We all get so much stuff to wade through that it can be overwhelming. It’s no secret that many of us receive hundreds of emails a day, and it piles up at an alarming rate. Go on vacation for a couple of weeks and you’re done for. I’ve seen Outlook inboxes with more than 30,000 items in them. Some of it-- the Nigerian scams, the email generated by viruses, the come-ons for various physical enhancements-- is clearly junk and can be deleted right away. Unless you’re like me and are entertained by these things. (If you’re not, find a good spam blocker. They can save you a huge amount of time managing your email.) Other messages are basically junk that we’ve asked for-- ads from online retailers where we’ve ordered things in the past, word-of-the-day emails, news summaries from The New York Times-- that can be dealt with (or not) when we have time. Then there are the administrative messages that contain information that might actually be important, but that we habitually ignore: the notices from HR about our benefits, the emails about what support services will be available on weekends and holidays, those pesky emails from the training department. They might all be useful, but the sheer bulk of the messages that we receive makes it difficult to pay attention to any of them. Where I work there is a large group of people who get what we call “staffing notices.” A staffing notice is generated whenever someone leaves or joins the firm, changes their title or their name, even when they switch desks. If you follow the staffing notices closely you can learn a lot: who has gotten married (or divorced), who finally made good on their threats to quit, who has been promoted. But the volume of them-- dozens a day-- means that very few people pay attention to them. When I was teaching classes on email etiquette, the staffing notices were specifically mentioned as “spam” more than any other kind of email.

Even if you get your readers to notice your email, they aren’t necessarily going to read the whole thing. When I talk to groups of people and ask them to name the single most annoying thing about email, what they talk about most often is that email is too long. It turns out that most people don’t want to receive email that looks like a letter, memo, or report. What they want is “just the facts.” The general consensus that I’ve seen is that anything more than three sentences is too long. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but that’s probably the way most of your readers feel, too. Unfortunately, many of them will react to your message based entirely on its subject line and won’t ever read the body of its text at all.