We hate to break it to you, but you might be annoying your co-workers with your emails. It's okay! Whether or not you are actually guilty of doing some of the things we'll talk about, it's good for all of us to brush up on some etiquette.
Our tech expert friend Marc Saltzman's got a new piece in USA Today pointing out four annoying habits people have and provides fixes for them.
1 - YOU WROTE AN ENTIRE EMAIL IN CAPS LOCK. It feels like you're being yelled at when you're sent something written in all caps. Maybe you didn't mean to capitalize everything you wrote and think you need to rewrite everything. Not the case! All you have to do is highlight what you need to fix, hit SHIFT + F3, and your problems are solved!
2 - Instead of banging out your emails on a keyboard, use your voice! Many Mac and PC have the ability to do text-to-speech, and there are free Chrome browser extensions for dictation in Gmail.
3 - Send emails at the right time. A few good times to send stuff out are before 10 am, mid-afternoon (2-3pm), and in the evenings (7-10pm). Late night emails or weekend emails are likely to be ignored by the receiver, and who likes getting an email on the weekend anyway?
4 - Keep it short. You're not writing the next great American novel. Just get to the point, but don't write things like "C u l8er." Just be a normal person.
The last thing Marc suggests people stop doing is sending huge attachments. If it's a big file, use a cloud service and provide a link to it. Marc Saltzman discusses all of this with us in today's edition of #TechTalk!