Every great movie has a memorable line that becomes fodder for the memeosphere. “If you build it, he will come” was the hot line from Field of Dreams, the 1989 classic. The line implied that by simply building a baseball field, something mysterious was going to happen.

It seems we may have adopted this adage when it comes to email.“Send it and they will read” seems to be the battle cry of millions of corporate citizens. There is a failure to recognize that the burden of communicating falls on the sender, not the receiver. If your email is not read, it’s because you didn’t make it readable. Readable emails get read – it’s that simple.

I would venture that over half of the emails I open are not readable. Most of them are too verbose, lacks an obvious purpose, have the wrong people in the sender list, or are only sent to cover one’s posterior. If I could avoid reading those, I would. Unfortunately buried deep within the bowels of some email is an important nugget of information that I need. Since I can’t tell ahead of time which emails are of value, I am forced to read the rest in frustration.

The reason I know this is because I have been perpetrating these crimes of email waste myself for the better part of my career. I am willing to bet that you have too. Here are some rules that I try to follow. Continue Reading…