Can you do three things?
 

Many years ago, a man told me that if I found a person I could assign 3 tasks, and they could complete them w/o further assistance or supervision, that person was a keeper. I have never found that person in 30 years. Close, maybe 2 1/2. That was good enough for me.

Of course, I have worked in construction since my mid 20's, so no wonder, eh?

Well, it gets worse, AFIC. I have observed that one cannot present more than one, two tops, subjects or thoughts in an email requiring a reply. I refuse to email thoughts or questions one at a friggin time.

It's gotten to the point that if you want to know something, you have to get your contact on the phone or, better yet, go to them in person. What is the point of all this electronic BS? It doesn't work for *****.

I have been using computers since 1995. I wasn't born with them; didn't touch one until I was 50. I haven't found a 3 subject email recipient in those 9 years. I need to give up, huh?

horses for courses. In general I hate phones and prefer email. That way I have a trail that is easily searchable, have time to think through my responses, etc. IM is great for other things, since I can have a "synchronous" conversation while doing other things. And I can log that too, giving me a permanent record.

The only time I like the phone is for conference calls when we need to sort something out *now* instead of over the next few hours/days. That, and when I need to try and "read" someone by the inflection of their voice (during negotiations, etc). And in that case face2face is way better since I can check body language.

And you wouldn't want to read some of my emails. I treat some of them like formal documents, and in general spend a bit of time making sure I'm saying what I want to say with carefully chosen words. And I even talk about more than 3 things. Crazy talk I know...

Shakespeare is noted as having the largest vocabulary of the English since the inception of the language. For example: Richard III's opening soliloquy, I'm certain, can carry three principal thoughts per any given sentence. You just need to break down the character and his surrounding circumstances.

ITOH, email? Food for the masses...

It's worse than you think.

I frequently work with "colleages" in the Asia/Pacific region who can't even follow simple instructions. They do not respond to email in any way, shape or form. They cannot communicate verbally in English (despite the fact that fluent English is a requirement for being hired at their various sites). And whenever they have a problem, their first response is to set up a teleconference for, say, 8PM or 6AM my time. Never mind that a simple one-line email could solve the problem.

For those of us who throw nothing away (I have over 300mb of work related mail archived for 7 years, and over 75 thousand messages posted to the 356talk listserv) keeping each subject in separate mail for the most part really does help with retrieving useful stuff later when you need it.

Yeow! I'm like that, though not with email. Nonetheless, I've tons of ZIP disks, CDRs and CDRWs. Too many, in fact. :(

John, or Billy, as it were, you make an extremely good point. I do use paragraphs and formal writing. Not run on sentences with no caps. However, you have shown me how to take it to the effective level.

The only thing I don't like about your suggested format is the lack of personality. In my emails, I try to give off a little of that 'inflection' that nostatic mentions. We tend to use emoticons on the BBS, and one can always use the symbolic ones in email. I sometimes do, especially if I want to make sure someone knows I'm being facetious.

I only communicate by email to Porsche people and related matters. My work involves in home sales and installation. I have to do all that in person. When I get home, I just want to type. :D I'll put your lessons to work. Thanks.

I do it a little differently. I hit reply and quote, then break apart the quoted sections with answers of comments to individual paragraphs.

The other thing I do is if an email has gone through a number of replies, at some point I will trim off much of the early text when I reply so you don't have a mile long email.

I prefer email for many communications. It is easier to ask a very specific question and require a concrete and detailed response. It is harder to evade, gloss over, hedge, and ramble, or at least it is harder to do so without getting called on it. Email is searchable and archivable, as already noted, so right and wrong answers can more easily be identified later. I can read email while doing other things, or on the subway, or on the weekends. Often I can read and comprehend an email more quickly than I can have the same thing explained to me by phone. Most important, you don't waste all that time chasing after the guy who doesn't pick up his phone and then leaves you an evasive vmail at an hour when he knows you're not around to pick up.

The main problem with email, for me, is that it is so easy to cc tons of it to everyone who doesn't care. I get 50MB a day, and after a while I start deleting everything from people who have a history of sending me useless stuff. As for spam, that seems to be less of a problem for me now. We have some good spam filters.

I have this problem with our Japan office. It is partly that their English is very poor, for which I don't blame them since my Japanese is nil. It also seems to be partly cultural - a cautious approach, often preferring a data dump to giving a "yes/no" opinion, and perhaps a desire to talk things through to consensus. In the end, I usually find that they know their job very well - there is simply a clash of styles. Interestingly, our Hong Kong guys are easier to work with - they are more direct and opinionated, more like Americans.