I love reading good prose, particularly a good narrative. Sometimes prose is called for in an email — to tell a story, explain your reasoning, provide some depth regarding your feelings on a topic, etc. Some people prefer the phone or face-to-face for those things, but in many situations, email is sufficient.

But many of the emails we send and receive every day aren’t this kind of content. They are instead heavily task-oriented — all about coordinating our work with other people. For these kind of emails, straight prose is generally a much less effective form of communication.

Over the years, as I’ve worked with people on communicating more effectively via email, I’ve observed that when people include more than one topic (even just two) in an email, all too often the recipient only replies to one of the topics. Then the sender has to reply back asking again about the overlooked issues.

Most people scan their email — they don’t read it closely. As a result, if there are action items, or items for which a specific response is expected from the other person, that needs to be clearly communicated in the email in a way that will still be effective knowing the recipient will likely just scan the email.

The solution? Numbered lists.

List each item that requires response or action with a number in front of it. You can then write a whole paragraph if you need to, but the numbered list accomplishes a couple of things:

1. Recipients are clearer as to what’s expected of them in terms of actions and responses. They can’t claim that it was buried in the email if it was specifically enumerated.
2. Recipients are less likely to skip an item when they respond. With the numbers, it’s easier to check for completeness of our response. If there are five items in the email, there should be five items in your response. I don’t claim this to be scientific — I just know it works.
3. If they skip an item, it’s easier to communicate back to them about it.  “Thanks for your response, but what about item #2?” No retyping — just a single simple question.

A few tips:

1. Numbers work better than bullets. I don’t have quantitative data on this, but I can tell you that both for myself and with my clients, I first tried using bulleted lists, and that was a noticeable improvement over prose, but people still tended to skip items. But with numbered lists, skipped items in responses fall to almost zero. Apparently, without the numbers, our brain kind of loses place. Also, you lose advantage #3 above.
2. Bolding the start of each item helps. Whether it’s complete sentences or just a phrase as a pseudo-header, bold-facing the beginning of each item improves scannability.
3. Two items constitutes a list. How often have you sent an email with two questions for the other person and they only reply to one of them? It happens, and numbering them helps prevent it.
4. One list item = one action item. It doesn’t do much good to create a list if each list item has two or three questions or separate actions. Break it down.

This clearly isn’t appropriate for every email, even those longer than a paragraph, but in the proper context, this has been a great tool for me and my clients in reducing email traffic and confusion. Try it for yourself and see.

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This is the first article of the two I have prepared for you regarding dealing with email – this one is about tips and tricks of getting a life outside of email. The second part will be about key practices of getting email done and processing to empty.

First thing – let’s try to get a life… a life Now, the big question  – how to deal with email? How to reply to all of these hundreds of emails that come flooding your email inbox daily?

Outside of Email.

There was a time when email was ruling my world – I’d have my email program popping up whenever I got a new message, I’d go and check my email messages every 5-10 minutes, I’d read some email messages three to five times…

And I couldn’t get most of my stuff done.

I had to take some drastic measures to get my life back and convert my Email from being my king… to being just a tool for communication…. ‘cos that’s what email is. It’s just a tool (or one of the tools) for communicating…

Here are three tips that work for me when fighting email addiction:

Step 1. Disable email auto-checking

Don’t have email check you – it’s you who should be checking email. Try to check email manually every hour or even every two hours if you’re so brave. It’s really a great thing for a start.

Step2. Remove auto-preview of emails
Many desktop programs like “Outlook” or “Thunderbird” or “The Bat” have an auto-preview pane where you can see the email message when you just move between messages in your inbox. This made me crazy. I was reading some messages many, many times…
When you disable this feature, you’d have to click on the email subject to actually “open the message” and read it. This is a real change – from just scanning the messages you’re deciding to open a message if you’re ready for it.

Step 3. Don’t create too many email folders.
If you’re an organization freak like me, you’d create email folders for anyone you’d correspond with.
Why would you do that? Why would you spend your day organizing and moving email folders? Are you a librarian or a busy professional? Stop today – just use the search feature to find the message you need.
That’s all there is to it for now – try to implement these three simply techniques as they worked perfectly for me:

1.    Disable email auto-checking
2.    Get rid of the message auto-preview
3.    Stop creating folders – use search

Make sure you try these and also let me know in the comments about your tips and tricks that help you regain your life outside of email.

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TC50: I’ve seen the future of email and it’s on the desktop.  Maybe.  Postbox is a new company launching today here at TechCrunch 50.  The application - and make no mistake about it, this is a full blown, download and install it desktop application - has set for itself some incredibly ambitious goals.  From the demonstration of the software, in addition to the standard functions of send, receive, store, search, spell check, attach files, and the other things a typical email client does, Postbox also offers some truly interesting additional features.  Features so compelling, the site - which the founders announced was open for a limited beta - was instantly knocked offline due to so many simultaneous download attempts from the people attending TC50 plus those watching TC50 streamed to their homes or offices.

Features?  Like What?

In seeking to describe the nature of the improvements that Postbox seems to offer the best general descriptive term I can come up with is semantic auto organization.  Just great, another confusing acronym, right?  SAO.  But what makes this new acronym worth remembering is what it means to you, the user.  Postbox founders claim (and demonstrated) that their software is capable of automatically grouping messages by topic.

If you’re interested in confectionery, model boats, knives and hedgehogs Postbox will identify these divergent interests in without any intervention on your part it will actually group the messages for you.  What’s more, it will go far beyond a mere gross grouping of the messages themselves.  The software is capable of identifying the various multimedia components in these messages and retaining them in individual galleries.  Imagine it, an end to peering into email folder after email folder or worse, message after message trying to find that one image you just know is there…somewhere…

In fact, based upon the demonstration I witnessed I think it’s safe to say that what we’re looking at here with Postbox is one of the first iterations of a truly semantic application or perhaps email. 3.0.  It’s tempting to say Web 3.0 but I’m reminded that this is not a web based application and probably won’t likely be one any time soon.

But Wait, There’s More…

In addition to making your mail contents much more broadly available as a reference database, Postbox offers a comprehensive suite of authoring tools that enable the creation of email messages and other documents that are a much richer experience than the email messages we craft today. Not only does Postbox make it possible to embed audio or video in an email, you can also search the web (from within the application) and again embed these results right into an email.

From what I understand Postbox also has a fairly tight integration with certain Adobe tools however I didn’t see this functionality demonstrated so I can’t tell you what to expect in this regard.  What I can say is that from the demo alone this appears to be a truly profound change in the way email can be used, managed and created.  That it will open up heretofore inaccessible realms to the user when it comes to data that you have already acquired but previously could not find or access in any reasonably convenient way.  Likewise the way in which searching the web and embedding results in messages is allowed within Postbox will, in my opinion, increase the value of both resources to the user.

Finally, by stealing a few notes from Google’s playbook and eliminating folders and replacing them with their semantic organizational structure plus some truly advanced searching and grouping functions Postbox brings even the most massive message stores into a much finer focus.  By getting rid of the silos and exposing the critical information in each email along with its relationship to other email, Postbox brings the information contained within each stored message closer to the user where it can do more than simply take up space on a hard drive.  By adding options that previously didn’t exist to the creation of email messages, Postbox has created an entirely new doc-type that has the potential to improve various communications, speed up decision making and review processes, and by developing an application that appears to offer these previously mentioned services as the result of semantic information, it appears that Postbox has begun the new era in applications.  2.0 is dead, long live 3.0!

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Have you ever stopped to think about how many different places you now have to keep track of online?  Credit Card accounts, Banking, Stocks, PayPal, Ebay, MySpace, Flickr and the list goes on and on and on…  Entire business models have been based simply upon keeping track of your passwords for all these sites but what no one has done is create a one-stop interface that lets you keep tabs on all the sites I’ve mentioned above plus dozens more from a single URL and with just one log-in.  At least no one until now.

PageOnce is a start-up that does exactly what I’ve just described.  The initial sign-up process takes just a few steps and once you’ve verified your the owner of the email address you’ve registered the web application starts walking you through adding all your accounts a sector at a time until you have filled out a surprising amount of real estate that does a pretty exceptional job of summarizing your online life on one page with one log in.

I spent a few minutes this evening speaking with PageOnce founders Guy Goldstein, CEO and Ahikam Kaufman, COO about their new application and equally exciting, their about to be released iPhone application, iOnce which should be available via the iPhone application store later this week.   I got to take a look at their new iPhone application and it’s every bit as slick as their online version.  This is a well thought out, intuitive and very easy to use application - figuring out what to do is definitely not a challenge and in only a few minutes you’ve consolidated your online life into one place.

Of course the big question you have to be asking here is what about security… and to be sure that’s the first thing that crossed my mind - especially when you’ve got all this information accessible on a mobile phone.  What, I asked, if you lose your phone?

Guy explained to me that it’s not quite as potentially injurious as it might seem.  That’s because the application doesn’t actually provide full blown access to all these accounts, just a window into them so that you can see what is happening with each.

In other words, if you lose your phone your finances aren’t in immediate danger but those nude photos you were hiding in your flickr account might be the subject of some viewing you hadn’t intended.  More over you can contact PageOnce and disable access to your account in the event that it has been compromised - althought you’re probably going to want to notify your bank and credit card companies just in case someone wrote down account information.

During my talk with Guy and Ahikam, I actually realized that they have a couple of interesting opportunities related to security and fraud prevention.  First, I suggested that they should offer an upgraded service that provides wallet protection for a fee.  Since you’re registering all these accounts anyway, why not have PageOnce contact your credit card companies and other service providers if your wallet gets lost or stolen?  Or have PageOnce be a one-stop-notification service to update all your providers that you’ve got a new address?  I’d pay for such convenience and I’ll bet a lot of other people would too.

The other area where PageOnce may have a big opportunity is with the credit card companies providing anti-fraud services.  After all, by putting consumers in much closer contact with what is happening on each of their accounts, we’re a lot more likely to notice an unexpected charge and take quick action before a thief manages to rack up some really damaging charges.

This is one of those ideas where as soon as you see it you say to yourself why didn’t I think of this?  I know I did.  All I can say is that I’m glad that someone was finally smart enough to make my life a little easier - PageOnce - as far as I’m concerned it’s a winner that will help you and me both get a few more things done every day.

Here’s a look at the PageOnce interface once you’ve set up a few accounts:

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Nutshell Mail has a great piece on taking control of that burgeoning inbox. If you’ve ever arrived at your office and been faced with over a hundred new messages, this post is a must read… Two GTD Times contributors, Scott Allen and Timothy Ferriss offer some best-practices, techniques and simple processes that will put you back in the drivers seat and keep that email beast under control.

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