By Keith Drury, www.TuesdayColumn.com

On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sent the telegraph message "What hath God wrought?" from the Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., to the B & O Railroad Depot in Baltimore, Md. The telegraph collapsed the world and made it possible to communicate instantly between places that formerly had taken weeks and even months to say something or get an answer.

Henry David Thoreau observed "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate… We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic…;but perchance the first news that will leak through the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough." If Thoreau and Emerson were worried 150 years ago about junk telegrams just think what they’d have to say about e-mail.

Five changes e-mail has brought: 

• Instant reaction. E-mail is so cheap and easy, folks tap out an instant reaction and click send without mulling over their input. E-mail communication is more visceral and sometimes vicious.
• Access to the bosses. With e-mail addresses widely known, just about any person can write directly to their pastor, DS, general superintendent or college President when they don’t like something. This means bosses must develop personal policies on answering as many as a dozen complaining e-mails a day.
• Democratization of input. Before e-mail, leaders decided things and sent out letters. Now they are expected to gather input first, canvassing the masses before deciding anything important. Leaders who decide things without input are now considered impulsive and out of touch.
• Centralization of decision making. Missionaries once simply made decisions “on the ground” where they were and sometimes went for months without contact with their mission boards. Now they check with headquarters before deciding things. Same for youth pastors and their senior pastors or any other formerly distributed organization.
• Over-communication. E-mail is “free” so everyone has decided to use it to get their message out and, even after the junk mail is filtered, there is still lots of almost-junk left to deal with. When a person receives more than 100 e-mails a day (common among leaders and many faculty members) they begin to ignore many of them as they increasingly are unable to sort the important from the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough messages. So here are ten possible resolutions to consider:

Ten E-Mail Resolutions:

1.  Write clear subject lines. Describe what you want in the subject line. For example:  “2 questions before board mtg.” or “Any open appointments Wednesday?” or “My outline for your review.” Avoid subject lines with obscure phrases like “Just checking” or “Message outline” and never leave it blank.

2.  Use FYI and AYC in the subject line. If you are sending something just “For your information” and there is no action required, put FYI first in the subject line:  “FYI—draft of 2009 budget.” If you don’t expect a person to read it today and you are sending it for them to read “At your convenience” start with AYC in the subject line.

3.  Keep it short. State everything you expect to be read in the first paragraph or at the most first screen. Give backup data below this in case they need more info. Write the top last.

4.  Begin at the end. State your question or decision you want made right off. Avoid several paragraphs clearing your throat or lengthy preambles or background statements. Put that at the end.

5.  Use reply-to-all sparingly. When the boss’s secretary e-mails a staff of 18 asking “Who is available this Saturday to work at the welcome center?” answer the secretary and don’t reply to all 18 people saying “I’m not available.” Why make 17 other people delete your reply? Reply-to-all is a function for discussions and deliberations where everyone is “talking” back and forth on a subject.

6.  Restrict CCs to necessary people. Sometimes people are so proud of their work they add a dozen people in the CC line just so everyone will know how much they’re doing. This is a cheap and fast way to boast which is often how it looks.

7.  Be careful of ever using BCC. A BCC sends your message (and sometimes a whole confidential conversation) to another person secretly. The ethics of using BCC are increasingly being questioned and if you need to share another person’s message to someone else simple decency should make us ask the person first. And when you send your own message secretly to another it is far safer to paste your message into another FYI e-mail than add a person as a BCC. Remember if you add a BCC address that person might click reply-to-all and then everyone will then know you secretly included them as a BCC.

8.  Avoid making recipients do extra work. When you attach a file be kind enough to take a few extra seconds to paste it into the e-mail as well as attach it—to save people time in opening files. It’s just considerate.

9.  Never use blinking images. Those cute little blinking images in your e-mail take longer for the recipient to load and sometimes even automatically will divert your email to the junk mailbox. A related matter is using a picture of your actual signature if you hold a position where you might worry about someone pilfering your signature and using it on an unauthorized letter or form.

10.  Don’t be a spammer. Sending e-mail is like printing money, the more you send the less value each of your e-mails have. You won’t know this until you stumble on people who don’t remember your e-mails—sometimes because they have made a filter to divert them into their junk mail box!

E-mail has been a wonderful blessing of in communication. It is also a curse. If we are just a bit more careful our own e-mails might be considered more of a blessing than a curse.