Guy Kawasaki — entrepreneur and venture capitalist — has written a great 12-point article giving tips for email senders. This is a subject near and dear to my heart, since sending and recieving email takes up about 70 percent of my working day.
# Don’t FUQ (Fabricate Unanswerable Questions), I. Many people send emails that are unanswerable. If your question is only appropriate for your psychiatrist, mother, or spouse, then ask them, not your recipient. When I get this type of message I go into a deep funk: (a) Should I just not answer? But then the person will think I’m an arrogant schmuck; (b) Should I just give a cursory answer and explain that it’s not answerable? (c) Should I carefully craft a heartfelt message probing for more information so that I can get into the deep recesses of the sender’s mind and begin a long tail of a message thread that lasts two weeks? Usually, I pick option (b).
# Don’t FUQ, II. There’s one more type of unanswerable message: the open-ended question that is so broad it should be used in a job interview at Google. For example, “What do you think of the RIAA lawsuits?” “What kind of person is Steve Jobs?” “Do you think it’s a good time to start a company?” My favorite ones begin like this: “I haven’t given this much thought, but what do you think about…?” In other words, the sender hasn’t done much thinking and wants to shift responsibility to the recipient. Dream on. The purpose of email is to save time, not kill time. You may have infinite time to ask essay questions but don’t assume your recipient does.
(via Hawk Wings)
Previously: HOWTO write ass-kicking emails and get a response