There are good reasons that the first thing most of us do when we create a new email is to address it. But that doesn't mean you should do it that way.
The best reason to address your email first is because it helps you to think strategically; addressing your message helps define your audience, what you have to say to them and the tone you use to say it. But, realistically, I think that most people address their messages first for no better reason than that they are used to filling out forms and that the “To” field is the first one they see in the top left-hand corner of a blank email. After choosing the recipients in the “To” field they move on and consider whether they need to “Cc” or “Bcc” anyone. By the time they get to the subject line they often seem to be too worn out to think of a good headline and are so eager to jump into the body of the text itself that they settle on something lame like “hi.”
I’m here to tell you that addressing your message first is a bad idea-- especially if your message is an important one. There are just too many thing that can go wrong and you don’t want your important message to go out before you’re sure that you’re done with it. Several years ago I was testing some of the early ultra-portable laptops for my firm. They came with small screens, no floppy or optical drives, and tiny cramped keyboards. There was one that I liked a lot, especially for carrying back and forth between home and the office. But its keyboard was a fatal flaw for me because the keys were too small and weren’t tactile enough to differentiate between them. I was constantly making typos. But the real deal-breaker was that I’d be in the middle of typing an email when something would happen and Outlook would send the message before I was done. It took me a while to figure out what was happening-- I was accidentally hitting the combination of the “Alt” and “S” keys, which is the keyboard shortcut for “Send” in Outlook. My goofy initial workaround to prevent this problem was to type some garbage characters at the beginning of each of my important emails so that spellcheck would stop them from being sent accidentally before I was ready-- which only works if you have spellcheck set to run automatically. But the whole thing is a little more Rube Goldberg than necessary. The better solution is just not to address your message until you’re done with it.
The worst thing that happened to be because of my premature emails was that I sent out typos and ideas that were left unfinished mid-sentence to a couple of people. But none of them were particularly embarrassing. It could have been far worse if these had gone out to an entire office or a group of senior directors. Or if I were venting by writing out an emotional reply to an email that I never intended to send.
Addressing your message last gives you the added benefit of making you think about the appropriate audience for your email once it’s done rather than before you’ve started. I’ve found that the audience for a message often changes while it’s being written, but people often neglect to rethink their list of recipients when they’re eager to get their email out the door. It’s always a good idea with any important email to take a look at the list of recipients and make sure your message is appropriate for all of them before you finally pull the trigger and hit send.
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