How to Avoid the Dreaded ‘Delete’ Key

Each morning as I open my e-mail, I sit with my index finger perched on the delete key. I suspect I’m like many others. Today’s e-mail environment has trained us all to be “vicious deleting machines.” We scan every sender and subject line looking for someone we recognize or something of value, and if we don’t find it ... zap, it’s gone. How long do we take to scan and delete what we don’t recognize? I take about one second, maybe less. It helps that I get lots of training each morning — I’m relentless. The volume of unwanted e-mails is now so high that we’ve become experts at deleting it in a nanosecond. No e-mail “gets a break.” I bet most of us have even deleted e-mails that we wanted just because we failed to recognize it in the one second we give ourselves to scan it. So what’s my point? It’s simple. Unless you have a clear sender and subject line that communicates in one, two seconds max, your e-mail is dead! Gone. Poof. Zap.