Organized to Be Your Best!: Simplify and Improve How You Work - Hardcover

Silver, Susan

3.26

38 ratings by Goodreads

9780944708613: Organized to Be Your Best!: Simplify and Improve How You Work

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0944708617 ISBN 13: 9780944708613

Publisher: Adams Hall Pub, 2000

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This remarkable system of organization approaches getting organized from a perspective that emphasizes the importance of integrating work with personal goals, handling change, and thriving in today's economy. Step-by-step instructions are given on how to prioritize and accomplish more high-value work, deal with instant communication and information overload, and create a versatile work space-at the office, at home, or on the road. Businesspeople learn how to manage time, simplify paperwork, and maximize filing systems-including files stored on the computer.

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About the Author:

Susan Silver is the recognized organizing expert and bestselling author of the award-winning bible of organization. She is a trainer, coach and speaking professional.

E-mail Writing Tips

You’ll notice that many of the following tips also apply to business writing in general. E-mail is doing much, in fact, to revive the art of writing as well as develop clearer thinking and decision-making—all important professional and personal skills.

1. Determine the recipient(s) of your message in advance. Decide who really needs the message. Knowing your audience will help you better frame the message.

2. Be very careful what you write—Any number of others could see it, without your even knowing it. See if your e-mail program has an “Unsend” feature, too.

3. Write a subject line that gets noticed. It’s useful to build in some kind of action and/or deadline that’s required. For regular correspondents, consider also using all capitalized code words, acronyms or other abbreviations followed by a colon in subject lines that reference a project, client or subject immediately.

4. Include the most important information right up front.

5. Use subheads, numbers and bullets to break up long messages and to guide your reader through your message.

6. Be careful about conveying negative information through e-mail.

7. Limit the use of capital letters. Besides being difficult to read, overuse of caps is the equivalent of screaming at someone. Don’t scream online.

8. Check the tone and emotional content of your messages. Avoid jokes and sarcasm unless you’ve clearly indicated you’re joking. It may be fine to use “emoticons,” the use of standard keyboard symbols as graphics to indicate emotion, but I’m not sure how universal they are and whether they will be understood. (Here are two common emoticons: :) stands for a happy face and signifies a grin.) If you include emoticons, do so only in more personal and informal messages.

9. Avoid sending long messages unless you’ve cleared it in advance with the recipient(s). Remote users will be particularly appreciative.

10. Read carefully. This goes for rereading a message you’re about to send as well as reading messages you’ve received in their entirety.

11. When responding to a message, clearly refer to the original message you received, if it’s not included in the reply. If it is included, be sure to use one or more greater than signs, >, before copy that the correspondent sent to you, which means “this is what you wrote.” (This may be done automatically for you when you highlight text and press “Reply.”) Include only those parts to which you are responding. Less than signs before text mean “I write.”

12. Use automatic responses if you’re going to be out of town and not checking your e-mail. Electronic versions of the form letter, “autoreply” or “autoresponse” mechanisms are also good for replying automatically to common or repetitive types of messages, questions or subjects.

13. Use a signature file (or “sig”) at the end of your message that includes your name, title, phone number and possibly your address. Limit it to no more than four or five lines. To make mine friendlier, I generally sign my messages with my first name, which I underline with the equal sign, and then I insert my sig. Omit the sig for very informal messages or for people you know well.

14. Delete extraneous information such as cluster addresses (distribution lists) whenever possible when you send either an original message or you forward one. Not only will it protect the privacy of those other recipients, it may prevent spammers from harvesting those addresses from your post. It also removes the need to scroll past them all to get to the message. And it’s more professional as well as personal; no one likes to be on everyone’s list. On the other hand, you may have certain “group lists” where you want everyone to know that they were each informed of an event, an announcement, etc.

15. Be brief. Learn to write brief, concise messages in short paragraphs (with no more than three sentences) that put your main points right up front so that they show up on the screen before scrolling. You may find your correspondents will copy your style. Write short paragraphs in block style that are separated with an extra blank line.

� Use bullets to list key ideas without long, wordy sentences. � Use white space. � Use boldface and color sparingly for highlighting key points. � Otherwise avoid graphics, which may take too long to load.

16. Request any action (or indicate FYI for nonaction) that you need from the recipient. If the action item is important, try to include it up front in the subject line.

17. Warm up e-mail by using the recipient’s name at least once. E-mail can be too cold, impersonal and autocratic otherwise.

18. Know when to use “reply” versus “reply to all. You don’t want to accidentally broadcast a reply that was meant for only one recipient.

19. Avoid sending large files that are part of the e-mail message; if you must do so, send it as an attachment.

20. Use the appropriate tone and style for the appropriate audience.

21. Indicate if a message should be restricted. Since it’s all too easy these days to copy and forward messages, be sure to indicate any restrictions, confidentiality or limited access.

22. Follow the style guide of your organization if one exists.

23. If you need a confirmation of receipt, try adding the following in all caps: *** PLEASE REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL TO CONFIRM RECEIPT ***.

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