Unnecessary Email Openers, The Entire Web in One Link, and more
Adding some intelligent colour to your office work, wherever that may be.
A Template of the Entire Web
Just open it up and fill in the gaps.
Stop With the Unnecessary Opening Email Lines, Please
“Hope you are well”
“Sorry to interrupt your day”
“How’re things with you?”
….. I find these email introductions unnecessary. In fact, I find them irritating. Not too sure why. After all, the author is attempting a friendly tone, and there can be no offense in being asked about your health. Is there?
Perhaps it is the inevitable next sentence which I know will be a request. And the request will require some effort on my part to resolve or respond. But I don’t mind doing work, so why would that irritate me? Sending me a task to complete is really a way of saying that the sender acknowledges I know something and I’m the best person to help. If anyone arcs up about that, then why are they at work, if not to do work?
No, I think there’s more to this. It’s probably something to do with the sense that the author is being false. The most unattached people write to me with these opening lines, as though we went to school together, and crave to be filled in about the last twenty years since we last saw each other. They’re not sorry, they’re not interested in my welfare.
The opening greeting is a copy of the verbal ice breaker typically used when you meet someone in the corridor, or they answer your call. The speaker doesn’t immediately launch into the purpose of the call. There seems to be a need to share a few verbal niceties to commence a conversation. And the same principle is applied to an email opening.
But email formats are different from voice-to-voice conversations. The author has already started with “Dear Malcom” and so that’s enough with the niceties…. Until the sign-off at the end.
The email is the older sibling of the text or instant message, neither of which usually starts with a greeting. Or end with a message sign-off.
The reader is at work and expects work to head their way via email. The content is all the reader is wanting.
The email respondent rarely responds with an explanation of the health or emotional state in their reply email, despite being asked, and so the one-way conversation starter becomes even more redundant.
Imagine too the odd instance when emails are forwarded on to another party. That vacuous greeting is still sitting there in the email trail, sitting in a sterile unrelated context. In the meantime, the email trail expands to include more facts, more figures, more dialogue all related to the essence of the topic.
I don’t use this sort of email opening. Do you think poorly of me?
One For Father’s Day
We all need more Mandy Patinkin in our lives. This is Special
Australian Indigenous Welcome to Country, or Acknowledgement of Country
Only Traditional Owners/Custodians of the land on which the event takes place can deliver a Welcome to Country.
Others deliver an Acknowledgement of Country:
'I begin today by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we <gather/meet> today, and pay my respects to their Elders past and present. I extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples here today.'
When?
It is usually delivered as part of Welcome and Housekeeping at meetings and events.
It should be delivered at significant or large internal meetings or meetings with external participants e.g. branch meetings, inter-departmental meetings.
Gembook
My travels around the internet this week took me to find out about:
- hobos (travellers looking for work) and tramps (scorn work, looking for adventure)
- Wabi Sabi (the acceptance of imperfection and transcience)
- definition of woke (‘collison of Social Movement and Marketing’)
- the world of untranslatable words (eg age-tori, culaccino)
- the Milk Crate challenge (where do they get all those milk crates from?)
- #goblinposting
..... and much more
Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.
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