Make Better Use of Your Subject Line

Composing an email with Gmail, from my account

As I get more and more email (especially at work) I have come to appreciate better use the “Subject” line. The subject line is one of the first things that people notice about your email and so often it is filled with subjects that barely even relate to what needs to be done with the email or the theme of the email. You can get a lot more response from your emails when you make better use of your subject lines and it can help to make your emails shorter, which most people will appreciate.

The subject field is one of the places that you can easily build credibility with your readers. Since this is one of the first things that people usually notice about emails (probably right after who sent it), why not make the subject actually fit the “subject” or theme of your email? If your email is about an important or “hot topic”, then your subject line should say so. This will help your email stand out from all the other emails received by your readers and will help it to get noticed. It is also a criteria used by many people to determine what order they read (or don’t read) emails.

Try to indicate any action that is needed within your subject line. You can do this any number of ways but the simplest way it to state what is needed from your readers? You can also state something like “ACTION REQUIRED…”. This helps to set expectations of your readers, because they know right up front that they need to do something and what they need to do. This can also get the attention of your readers because some readers will scan for emails that give cues that something is required of the reader.

Do you have a question to ask of your reader(s), why not ask it in your subject line? Your readers will see your question quickly and can respond quickly because they know that an answer is needed from them. If it is a simple question you can put in the subject line and end it with “…? EOM”. “EOM” stands for end of message. This tells the reader that there is nothing to read in the email. This allows you to write quicker emails and get your answer quicker because you don’t need to put greetings and some of the other things that you might usually include in your email. It is short and to the point. If you need to explain your question, this can be done within the body of your email. How many emails have you sent where you only needed the answer to a simple question?

I’m sure that you’ve probably received emails with subject lines that looked like this “FW:FW:FW:FW:….” or maybe “RE:RE:RE:…”. With these emails that have been forwarded or replied to many times, why not remove some of the “FW:”s or “RE:”s? You only need to leave one in to make the point that this email is part of a chain. While you’re at it, why not clean up the email a little bit and remove parts of the chain that don’t add value to the discussion that has already taken place. Most email programs will indent each time the email has been forwarded or replied to, so that it is easy for people to see that your email is part of a chain. You can take out a bunch of the forwards or replies so the email is shorter and easier to read, especially if this allows you to keep the contents of the email within a normal computer screen or monitor and the reader doesn’t need to scroll through the email. The more the reader has to scroll, the less likely they are to read emails. The only time to remove forwards or replies that don’t and any value to the mail is based on who the people are that forwarded/replied were. If your department manager or a company executive is in the email chain, you want to make sure that people see that.

Sometimes you’ll send emails that don’t require any action from your readers. In these cases why not indicate this in your subject line. You can write something like, “FYI:…”, this tells your readers right away that they email is for their information and that you don’t require any action from them. If you do send a joke of funny email that you can also do something like “HUMOR:…”, this will help your readers to prioritize their inbox. Try to develop your own cues that you can use to get a good deal of your message across within your subject line. If there is a social event, how about something like, “SOCIAL EVENT:…”, this lets your reader know that this isn’t the standard meeting that should probably attend.

In a world where so many of us are deluged with email, better use of your subject line will be appreciated and is more likely to get you the results that you seek. Do you have any special way of using your subject lines? If you have any other comments, I would love to hear them. If you liked this article, please consider subscribing to the blog via RSS or email, share it on del.icio.us or on Digg and pass it on to anyone that you think might appreciate it. Thank you. :)

On Deck…

I’ll be publishing posts about…

• The next in my series of weight loss strategies
• My next Spotlight on the web.
• More on productivity, web 2.0, social networking, family, parenting, health, and other things that you can use.

Other Posts That You Might Also Like to Read…

• Does Your Approval Process Work For You Or Against You?
• The Customer Is Always Right
• Lessons Learned
• Keep Your Projects Simple Stupid
• Why Not Create Tasks Right From Your Inbox?
• Treat Others The Way That You Wish To Be Treated
• Easter Greeting…14 Principles for Dealing With Other People
• Are Your Assumptions Holding You Back?
• Who Mentored You
• GTD Overview
• Keep Your Projects Simple Stupid
• Why Aren’t You Working Your “Someday/Maybe’ Projects?
• Is It Time To Review Your Insurance Coverage?
• Should One Parent Stay Home After Your Child Is Born?
• Teaching Our Kids About Money
• Heart Check

Does Your Approval Process Work For You Or Against You?

"Computers" courtesy of coolpix

I know that many of you have seen the drill before, the forth quarter comes and all of a sudden it is time to cut costs, so the approval levels are clamped down air tight so that no money is frivolously spent and your balance sheet looks better. Now all of a sudden procurement approvals go all the way to corporate vice presidents, travel requests need to be approved at high levels of a geography, region, or even higher, and classroom style trainings are all but eliminated. This is a reactionary device that seems to happen all too often. What is generally given little (if no thought) is the effect that this has on your overall approval processes as these short-term solutions tend to become the defacto policy and become harder to change (for the better anyways). This leads to the question, is your department’s or company’s approval process working for you, or against you?

In this bottom line and reactionary focus some other items that contribute to the true cost of these things are often neglected or not given enough consideration. Buying that server now doesn’t truly cost you the $5,000 listed in the purchase scenario, nor does the plane ticket cost you the $2000 that the travel agency or airline wished to charge you. The true cost is now the time of all the people involved in the approval work flows. The person raising the request must now keep track of “where” their request is in the approval process, this can be very time consuming and costly as surely this is not what most people were hired to do. Because of the use of various workflow management software programs and offshoring of many back-office functions, it isn’t always clear with which approver the request is now sitting. It is now very likely that you have to originate your request via email to a group mailbox or a web form before the request actually gets into your workflow management program, so you are not the originator (in that system anyways) and don’t have visibility of what approver your request is with and more than likely if you can see who the current approver is, you don’t see all the approvers that are needed. These vice presidents and other high-level managers are often not available and have other things to do beside approve our petty requests. Add to this, that these upper level managers will often decide that they will approve such request only once or twice a week, making the approval process that much longer. Because these managers need to quickly make decisions, they now require some sort of clarification about the request when it is their designated decision time, this often means an email is required from the original requestor or perhaps there is a nice excel or word template that now needs to be filled out, requiring more time from some employee (be it the original requestor or someone working in the back office). Very often these forms are not easy to understand and it is not very apparent how to fill them out. Because the manager doesn’t see the information they “need to see” the either reject the request or delay approving it, this might mean that request’s approval now needs to wait for that manager’s next approval cycle, which might be a whole week later. If the process is even documented, it is buried in an email somewhere or lost in the bowels of your company’s intranet, which means that you’ll now probably have to spend some quality time searching for it. I think that you get the picture, you now need to really calculate the time of everyone involved in the process. Factoring in all these people and their time could easily mean that the server is now actually costing your company over $100,000 or worse! Now imagine that the request got all the way to the top and that vice president said that this item was too expensive and not justifiable, rejecting the request. Your company might have just spent $95,000 to save $5000! The expression about being pennywise but pound foolish seems to apply here. The corporate world seems to have taken a page from the playbook of many national governments is buying ridiculously expensive/inexpensive items (remember all those stories about the military spending ludicrous amounts on hammers and so on?)

Another cost that is harder to quantify is your department or company’s loss of flexibility and its affect on your projects, operations, customer relationships, and employee morale and motivation. It could very well be that “the process” does have a provision for emergency situations. If a server breaks and your warranty won’t cover the immediate replacement of it, you probably can not wait a few weeks for all the approvals needed (service level agreements could be broken resulting in penalty payments due a customer(s) far in excess of the $5000 server). Even the fast track process is still probably not flexible enough to give you the speed needed. There are also those impromptu or emergency customer or project meetings that require travel but lining up the pre-approvals can require time that means the bargain rate you saw on the internet is no longer available when you can finally book it, making hotel stays and airline tickets more expensive than they need to be. There are many visits and meetings that had to be canceled because the travel couldn’t be arranged in time. The relationship with your customer could be impacted because you’re very restricted in your ability to travel. Having face to face meetings can strengthen relationships and raise the level of cooperation that is not possible with a million emails and telephone conferences, not to mention that level of understanding that can be reached when all parties are in the same room. When the approval processes become so inflexible, complicated, and bureaucratic, employee morale is affected, often adding further to the productivity loss, some of your more talented and valuable employees may decide to leave your company in part because of such short-sighted policies and procedures!

What is the solution? First of all the process should be reviewed from end to end, not just bitts and pieces of it. Maybe some of the management approval levels can be removed. If you truly want the final approval to come from a vice president, why not route it to the v.p. earlier in the process and eliminate some of the middle management? The request would still get review by the v.p., but some of the time and expense can be cut out. Also, is the v.p., in all honesty, going to give the request the review that was originally intended? They might look at it for all of 5 minutes before making their decision and there is all the expense of getting the request to them for this 5 minute review. How about raising the authorization or empowerment levels? Chances are that your v.p doesn’t need to be involved in all those approvals; this demotivates the other managers in the process, that they have such little authority. There could be periodic reviews of approval decisions that are made and these levels can be modified as necessary. The simpler the process, the less costly it will be to actually use it, so the process should be only as complex as it needs to be and not more. Looking at the situation a little deeper, you’ll probably find that the budget crisis faced in Quarter 4 is only a symptom of the problem. Travel, procurement, and training should all be covered within respective budgets for departments, business units, and regions; as long as the items requested are within the proper plans and are truly allowed and planned for, they shouldn’t be the problem, but they do need to be budgeted for, so when that budget is used for other things the problems occur. This can often be the result of some systemic problems that need to be uncovered and dealt with. Such complicated procedures and processes, often give employees the sign that they aren’t trusted, probably not a signal your department or company wants to send. Lastly, in reviewing the process, you should try to look at things from the outside in. Can you explain the logic to someone with little knowledge of your department or company? You just might find that logic needs review and adjustment.

Have you given any thought to how your company or department manages these approvals? Has your department or company come up with some creative solutions to these problems? If you have any other comments, I would love to hear them. If you liked this article, please consider subscribing to the blog via RSS or email, share it on del.icio.us or on Digg and pass it on to anyone that you think might appreciate it. Thank you. :)

On Deck…

I’ll be publishing posts about…

• The next in my series of weight loss strategies
• My next Spotlight on the web.
• More on productivity, web 2.0, social networking, family, parenting, health, and other things that you can use.

Other Posts That You Might Also Like to Read…

• The Customer Is Always Right
• Lessons Learned
• Keep Your Projects Simple Stupid
• Why Not Create Tasks Right From Your Inbox?
• Treat Others The Way That You Wish To Be Treated
• Easter Greeting…14 Principles for Dealing With Other People
• Are Your Assumptions Holding You Back?
• Who Mentored You
• GTD Overview
• Keep Your Projects Simple Stupid
• Why Aren’t You Working Your “Someday/Maybe’ Projects?
• Teaching Our Kids About Money
• Heart Check

Should One Parent Stay Home After Your Child Is Born?

"Walking Together" courtesy of hotblack

So you’ve recently had a baby (or maybe even multiples) and now you need to decide if one parent will stay home with your child, or will both parents work, or can you make some other arrangement? This is a decision that most every couple with kids must face at sometime or another, how do you decide?

There are those people that will try to judge you as a parent without really knowing your circumstances, who will make statements such as “you shouldn’t have had kids if you couldn’t afford for one parent to stay home with them to raise them” and “a women’s place is in the home”. If these are beliefs held in your household, maybe you have already made your decision, but you should at least consider a few things before carving this in stone. For most families, they will at least need to consider if both parents need to work or not, even if money isn’t an issue.

We made a few different decisions in this area; you might even say that our choices evolved over time. When our oldest daughter was born, my wife worked part-time and we were lucky enough that Oma was with our oldest when my wife worked. When our youngest daughter was born (you need to keep in mind that there is 17 months age difference between our kids) was born, my wife stayed home until the youngest entered kindergarten (this was at 3 in our part of Germany). Then my wife started to work part time. She has done a few different things but all have considered self-employment, which means that there was no tax with-holding by an employer. There is a certain amount of money that can be earned by a spouse that allows them to still be covered under the primary income earner’s healthcare coverage, but once that threshold has been crossed, every cent that your spouse earns now basically goes to pay for their own healthcare coverage needs, so there isn’t any additional take home pay earned until your spouse’s pay exceeds the cost of paying for the health insurance. My wife was totally de-motivated to think that in the one bracket she was basically working to pay for health insurance coverage, and we didn’t want her to work the number of hours necessary to be able to pay for her coverage based on her earnings. We decided that my wife would keep her earnings under the threshold where she would have to pay for health insurance and that kids and her could be covered under my policy. We were recently surprised to find out that we owe a substantial amount of taxes because of my wife’s self-employment status. Without going too much into the taxation issue, it seems that as much as half the money she earned was being taxed at 50% or more, which gives you another thing to consider if both parents should work and if so under what conditions?

While you might not feel that you have a choice about one parent staying home or not, you might feel that financially both parents need to work, this is something that should be discussed between both parents. This is one discussion that needs to happen for a variety of reasons. If this decision is made without any discussion and input by both parents, one parent might come to resent it later, causing strain on the couple’s relationship and the family as a whole. Because this is such a big thing with such wide-reaching ramifications, both parents need to be in agreement with this decision. Also, there are some couples where the father stays home, where the couple rotated who stayed home, and where both parents reduced their working hours for a period of time, so the mother doesn’t have to always be the primary care giver.

Without further adieu, here are some things that you’ll want to consider in your decision about both parents working…

• Stay at Home Mom vs. Working Mom. There seems to be a battle within the world of women where one group kind of resents while envying the other. Working mothers often feel guilty for not being with their kid (s), that they are some how neglecting their responsibilities as a mother. They can also feel that someone else is raising their kid (s). Stay at home mothers can sometimes develop self-esteem problems, feeling that there is more to life than taking care of their kids and that they’re somehow missing out. They can also feel that they aren’t contributing to society. While at one level, stay at home mothers know that they’re doing something important, at another level they often forget this and can feel trapped by the house and the kids.

• What about the career of both parents? Between the two of you, who has better career possibilities, if they continue working? Is one of you willing to put their career on hold to stay at home for a while? Will it hurt the career of one (or both) of the parents to stay at home for a while? Because there can be a lot of resentment by a parent that stays at home if this isn’t discussed, This really needs to be properly considered.

• How much is child care going to cost? Day care and baby sitters can be very expensive and it likely that this will eat a big chunk of the income brought in by both working parents, these costs can make staying home much more attractive (financially at least). You’ll also want to consider that day cares and sitter will often not take your kid (s) when they’re ill, which can be quite often when they’re young, so you’ll need to make arrangements for these situations. Day cares and sitters take vacation and can get sick, which can leave you in a tough situation more often than you might think.

• Will you need to keep two cars in order for both parents to work? If one parent staying home means that you can get down to one car, means that you eliminate the money associated with the second car for; monthly car payments/lease, car repairs, insurance, fuel (not to be overlooked considering our current high gas prices), normal maintenance, and so on. You’ll also need to remember that just because one parent stays at home doesn’t necessarily mean that you can or will get rid of one car. You might find that the parent staying at home does need their own car. By giving up your second car, you are giving up some flexibility and you might find that you don’t save that much on fuel costs, if the one spouse has to take and pick up the other work, this means that you have only moved the fuel expense from one vehicle to another, not realizing any net savings in this area. By driving the one vehicle the same distance at was being covered by two, now means that there will be more wear and tear (more maintenance and repairs) needed because of more use and you could easily exceed the mileage restrictions on your vehicle’s lease.

• Two working parents will need a wardrobe for two working parents. While the types of clothes needed depend upon the type of work that you do, in general there aren’t too many jobs where you can get by wearing the same clothes to the office as you do at home, this means additional cost to figure into your calculations and considerations. The wardrobe of the second parent may even need to be dry-cleaned or require special care. By one parent staying home, you might be able to save the money that you would ordinarily have needed to spend on a special wardrobe.

• What will your health insurance costs be? Depending upon the working conditions of the second parent, it is likely that there will now be health insurance costs associated with the fact that they’re now working. These costs can be very large and the total amount spent on healthcare coverage will be less, with one working parent and the whole family covered under this policy, than needing two policies because of two working parents.

• What tax issues to you need to consider? With a second parent working, there is a good chance the couple’s income will move into higher tax bracket than with only one working parent. This means that less money is coming in that from the second income because it is now being taxed at a higher rate. You might find that after you consider in change in tax brackets, that there really isn’t so much more actual money coming in from the second parent working!

• As a stay at home parent, you can spend a lot of quality time with your kid (s). It is hard to put a price tag on all the memories. There are unique memories at all times of you children’s lives, not just when they’re an infant or toddler, and you can be there for a lot of those memories. There is a difference to the dynamic of the relationship between the stay at home parent and a working one. Often, the stay at home parent will have a closer relationship to their children than they might have if they worked. Having more time to spend with your kids means that you can have more of an impact on the values they develop and how they’re raised in general. You can also avoid having your own version of that Harry Chapin song “The Cats in the Cradle”.

• The stay at home parent can avoid some of those unpleasant things from the working world. They don’t have a time clock to deal with (although being a parent is a 24/7/365 job that doesn’t end at 5pm). They don’t have to worry about office politics and gossip). They avoid doing those administrative requirements that leave you scratching your head as to “why do you have to do this again?” It isn’t so easy to send unruly bosses and clients to their room when they have gotten on your nerves.

• Maybe there are there some creative solutions that you haven’t thought of. A stay at home parent might be able to start their own business. They might also be able to do a variety of work online, at hours that fit into their schedule. We have a friend that runs her own day care, which has allowed her to stay home with her kids.

• Have you given the financials enough consideration? After considering the items that I have mentioned above, you might find that the little bit extra coming in from the second working parent is not worth it, you may actually be losing money because of it.

• Make a decision for yourselves. You’ll want to consider all the things above, but it would be great if you could make a decision that you want and that you’re happy with rather than letting the circumstances dictate your decision. Hopefully you know your priorities and what is important to you; it would be good if your decision can incorporate this.

Take the time to decide if it makes senses for both parents to work and make a decision that you both parents can live with. Is there anything else you think needs to be considered in this decision? How did you decide if one parent would stay home or not? If you liked this article, please consider subscribing to the blog via RSS or email, share it on del.icio.us or on Digg and pass it on to anyone that you think might appreciate it. Thank you. :)

On Deck…

I’ll be publishing posts about…

• The next in my series of weight loss strategies
• My next Spotlight on the web.
• More on productivity, web 2.0, social networking, family, parenting, health, and other things that you can use.

Other Posts That You Might Also Like to Read…

• Is It Time To Review Your Insurance Coverage?
• The Customer Is Always Right
• Treat Others The Way That You Wish To Be Treated
• Easter Greeting…14 Principles for Dealing With Other People
• Are Your Assumptions Holding You Back?
• Who Mentored You
• GTD Overview
• Keep Your Projects Simple Stupid
• Why Aren’t You Working Your “Someday/Maybe’ Projects?
• Teaching Our Kids About Money
• Heart Check