Manage Your Life with Outlook®: for Dummies®

Chapter 9. Creating and Sending E-Mail Messages Like a Pro

You've probably heard the old saying "it's far better to give than to receive" many times. When it comes to e-mail messages, I think you'll agree that this idea surely applies. For as the strategies for dealing with e-mail covered in the previous two chapters make plain, being inundated with e-mail messages day after day is one of the largest challenges to personal productivity that any knowledge worker faces.

Although being on the receiving end of way too much e-mail is consistently a number one personal productivity concern, you need to realize that an inability to efficiently and effectively compose and send out e-mail messages can also negatively impact your workflow as well. This is all the more true if your job relies heavily on e-mail as a primary means of communicating and keeping in touch with your clients and coworkers.

The focus of this chapter is on the ways you can be as effective in composing and sending out e-mail messages as you are in fielding the ones you receive. To that end, this chapter covers both the dos and don'ts for composing new e-mail messages, along with strategies for the most effective ways to track the messages you send out.

Composing Effective E-Mail Messages

Nothing wastes quite as much e-mail processing time as having to wade through a rambling e-mail message, which at the end leaves you as puzzled about its subject matter as you are about the response that the sender wants from you. Therefore, ...