#digital manners

[kids-worldfun]

Top Ten Rules of Texting Etiquette For Children

How many hours do children converse with other children nowadays? If a child is not at school, do you see him/her talking on the phone with friends? Chances are that you would see them glued to the phone, chatting with someone. They prefer texting to talking. Texting is easier. Why? When you text, the other person is faceless. It is easier to communicate when the other person is faceless. In such…

Top Ten Rules of Texting Etiquette For Children

[mdial]

Digital Etiquette - The Survey Says...

Digital Etiquette – The Survey Says…

Last week, I conducted a survey and received nearly 200 responses. You can see the first post on the topic here, featuring the results across the 13 questions, each of which tackled a specific “digital” situation. For each question, the respondents were asked to rate the behaviors of how people used these digital tools. Here are some of the important points that came out of further research.…

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[mdial]

Digital Manners - Stemming the Tide of Poor Habits and Etiquette

Digital Manners – Stemming the Tide of Poor Habits and Etiquette

It’s true that my peers and I (as well as plenty of those that followed) went to school with any more than (at best) access to a computer. So how is society to self-educate? With parents that haven’t been trained, we are supposed to be setting the course. But, it is most disconcerting to see how digital manners have taken a back seat, even among the “more mature” people (and parents). Where and…

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[mdial]

Why email communication doesn't work! The key to getting your communications right

Why email communication doesn’t work! The key to getting your communications right

Time management has to be one of the biggest issues in today’s business world. Whether it is about “managing” your time or, more philosophically, knowing more precisely what you really want to achieve in your life, people everywhere are struggling with the constraints of this 24-hour day. One of the key challenges is knowing how to manage the plethora of communication tools and devices. At once…

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[dailysessions]

Email is a conversation...

Let’s assume for a minute that email is here forever. We’ll ignore those on the bleeding edge of digital culture who say, actually, it’s already dead among the younger generation. It’s been almost a full 20 years since email took over as the default medium for business communication. It only took a couple more years for it to take over personal communications too, so we’ll go ahead and lump them together as 20-year-old staples of modern communication. But after all this time, after literally hundreds of thousands of emails that many of us have sent and read, personally, the question of the greeting and salutation structure within emails seems to be as-yet unresolved. Or at the very least, it seems we have never reached a common set of agreements, in terms of the opening and closing of email correspondence.

We all learned in school, at some point, how to not only address a letter, but also a set of options for how to open and close different types of written communiqué. “Dear Sir/Madam” would be appropriate for any formal communication to another adult with whom you are not personally familiar. “To Whom it may concern” would be used in a formal communication directed toward an organization when you were uncertain of any specific person to whom it should be addressed. Etcetera, etcetera. Closings were of the “Thank you,” “Sincerely,” and “Respectfully,” variety, but the rule of thumb was that the openings and closings should be relatively free of any emotional sentiment. The basic idea is to establish and maintain and orderly and business-like tone for the communication. Cold, clear and crisp, like Fall.

Personal communications were similar, with subtle differences. “Dear _____” was pretty standard for any letter to someone with whom you were personally familiar; friends, family, etc. Maybe a “Hello ____,” or “Hi _____,” or even “Hey _____,” would feel right and comfortable. The closings ran the gamut from “Thanks,” or “Warm regards,” to “Love,” or “Yours.” The general idea is to convey sentiment and/or emotion from one person to another. Warm and soft, like Summer.

Similar to when meeting in the physical world, on paper we wanted to set the tone. This was not only to make ourselves feel comfortable, but equally for the other party’s comfort, and to provide them clues and cues as to the appropriate tone for the subject matter at hand. It also reinforced the unspoken level of relationship between the parties - cool and business-like, or warmer and more personal.

The key point here, really, is that these unspoken agreements for appropriately opening and closing written communications served to offer substantially greater efficiency and economy of language (and therefore time). So why can’t we agree on a similar set of structural cues for digital communications? With 21st century communications - daily heaps of emails back and forth and around the world - I’d like to propose a simple analogous structure from our paper-based heritage.

The opener should still meet and match the same general guidelines as above. Relatively little change is required there, as those are general categories - basically, business vs. personal - and easily applicable to communications, regardless of medium. The closings, similarly, can also be adopted virtually as-is (no pun intended). So what’s the problem, you’re asking? It’s within the inevitable back-and-forth, often within a very short span of time - that eats up so much additional time and effort that could easily be repurposed elsewhere.

Most major email clients (e.g. Gmail, Outlook, etc.) now group an ongoing back-and-forth into “threads” or “conversations.” This is a relatively new development, and was a major shift in the transition of our mental framing related to written communications, moving from paper to pixels. For these thread-based scenarios, the guideline (rule?) I’m about to propose is just a natural fit. But even if your chosen email application doesn’t group your emails this way (i.e. by subject line), this suggestion would still make perfect sense, and offer the same time and energy savings, for both parties.

Very simply, we initiate a “conversation” with the sender starting with a greeting, and closing with a salutation at the end. The recipient then does the same in their initial response, opens with a greeting, and closes with a sign-off or salutation. Now as soon as that conversation extends beyond the first exchange, the formality (or lack thereof) has been established, and the tone of the conversation is set. We should now be able to comfortably continue back and forth until the issue is resolved.

This is the same as in real-life. I would not continue to preface each of my statements with a greeting, and close with a salutation. In other words, if we’re talking, I would not say, “Dear Jim” at the beginning of each comment, then finish my statement with “Best regards.” This seems so simple and obvious, but I send and receive enough emails per week, among significantly varied audiences, to confidently report that this is a pervasive issue across the board.

I’ll use a past employer as an example. The company policy - in the orientation process, and documented in the employee handbook - was to open and close each and every communication with an opener and salutation. And this was within a digital company - one that makes its living from pixels, exclusively. I even recall at least one instance where the CEO himself reprimanded someone for letting this standard slip in their internal correspondence. Internally(!) we still had to formally address each other, and formally close. I only share this as an example of the most extreme case of email inefficiency, and unnecessary additional verbiage.

Think about how long it takes to first decide the appropriate email greeting, then to type it - let’s call it 5 seconds, conservatively. Now add the same quick steps to close - another 5 seconds, and we send that first communication. Back comes the response, and it requires a response from me - we’re having a conversation. So now I’m supposed to add another 10 seconds to the time spent responding? Then add the time spent reading the greeting/salutation in each response, at least another 2-3 seconds each time, even if you’re skimming right past it. Think about how quickly that adds up over an average day, every week, each month, through the year. We’re talking a little over 4 minutes per day, which totals about 25 hours over the course of a year. That’s one entire day and night wasted on superfluous formality.

This might sound petty - what’s another 5 or 10 seconds here or there? But if you do the math, you’ll find it’s not an insignificant number over an average week. We’re all already complaining about how there’s never enough time in the day, and how much of that time is sucked away with digital endeavors. Imagine if you spent that time instead, in an actual face-to-face conversation with somebody in your life?

Just in case it wasn’t already clear, all I’m proposing here is that we collectively agree that it’s normal, acceptable, smart even, to eliminate greetings and salutations within an email thread/conversation that is already established. Once the greetings have shown up once, now we can just focus on the business at hand, the contents of the body of the email. If you respond with a question, I can simply respond with an answer, just like a real conversation. This could/would never be seen as rude or impolite. In fact, this is a way of signaling to the other party that you’re not interested in wasting their time, or yours. It’s actually an effort extended out of respect for their time.

Can we get this going, please? Anybody got any ideas how we can spread this concept?

Dear Emailers,

Let’s end the silliness.

Respectfully, Me.