It seems to be an unwritten rule: The higher up the food chain in business, the shorter and brisker the emails get. Somewhere on the line, the “hello”, the “please” and the “thank you” get lost. At first sight, this might look like unbelievable efficiency. It might look important, even cool – “hey, Bob is so busy and important, he can just write a one-liner and make a whole department work for a week” – but truth be told, it is not cool. It shows a lack of respect, if you ask me.

So however important you are (or think you are):
Open wit a greeting, address people by their names. Say please. Say thank you. End appropriately. Use upper case and lower case, and put in some grammar while you are at it. If you do not have enough time at hand to write a respectful email, pick up the phone and call the person. If there is not enough time to do even that, gosh, I am sorry for you. Go read some of the articles on GTD on this site to increase your personal effectiveness. Cutting down your mails to barfing orders is NOT the way to go to save time.

Ever suffered from the VP-one-line-mail hammer? Experienced good things because you paid attention to write sensible mails? Let the community know! (yeah, I am implying a KillerConsultant community here. Hey, we all have dreams!)

It seems to be an unwritten rule: The higher up the food chain in business, the shorter and brisker the emails get. Somewhere on the line, the “hello”, the “please”...

[UPDATE:

The gods of the internets are against me today. And for you. As of now, Xobni is directly available for you to test and indulge - which of course means that there is no real incentive anymore for you to jump through any hoops at the KillerConsultant to get it. Which blows my great idea of some semi-forced audience interaction.

But if you really like the KC, you will tell the rest of the world how you like your Xobni plugin in the comments anyway, right?!]

Hey there,

it is Monday, let’s see if we can get a conversation going. The deal is simple: I have five invites for Xobni to give away.
Xobni, if you have not heard of it yet, is a cool new plugin for Outlook which gives you a whole new look on your email experience: In a sidebar, it shows you all sorts of information about the person whose email you are just reading. When in the day, for example, you get most email from that person, their phone number, their contacts, a list of recent conversations and files received from them. Apart from that, Xobni also does a whole lot of statistics-voodoo on your mail – but that main sidebar in itself really is something you should try. I might go as far as saying that this could make email management fun again!

Xobni is in invitation-only beta right now… and you can get one of these invitations.
There are only one and a half conditions:

• Within a week of receiving the invite, you write a paragraph worth of your experiences with Xobni – what you liked, what you thought was cool, what features you missed, and if you’d recommend it. I’ll publish those short reviews here, of course with your name and a link to your website, if you want.
• The “half” condition: I’d prefer consultants to get the invites, of course – but if in the next days there are no consultants to be found reading this site (darnit!), I’ll open the tickets up for everybody else.

Go, sign up in the comments!
I am looking forward to seeing how you guys like / use / see Xobni.

[UPDATE: The gods of the internets are against me today. And for you. As of now, Xobni is directly available for you to test and indulge - which of course...

Time management often seems to be the issue – but is it really?

My own experience tells a different story. Of course, time management is important, especially in the fast-paced consulting world, where sometimes you feel like the week is just a stream of deadlines, meetings and deliverables. But often enough, energy is a more limiting factor than time…. and it seems that researchers agree big time.
Introducing The Energy Project, founded by Tony Schwartz, has been following this question for a few years now.
I got onto them because a former colleague sent me their article from Harvard Business Review, titled “Manage your Energy, Not Your Time”. It is available as a free download right from the website of The Energy Project.

Go there now, download it, print it out, read it the next time you are on the plane, train, or whatever your mode of transportation is.

The basic proposal is:

Be aware of what you focus on, and when.
Don’t try to multitask throughout the whole day, because it wears you down (Classic example: The every-five-minutes email interruption)

Fuel yourself with the energy of meaning and purpose.
I see some grinning faces already – as the tasks of a consultant bring it, sometimes when you are knee-deep in some data analysis, it is hard to see meaning and purpose of what you are doing there. What might help there is being aware of the big picture – what you will do with the data you dig out, for example. If the big picture is nothing that carries meaning and purpose for you, that would be an alarm bell ringing very loud right there.
In the worst case – when you are a junior down in the smallest stream of a huge project, far from the big picture strategy… be a renegade. Make your analysis, your pile of data, your Powerpoint slides something special – make it a game if you will.
If there is no meaning in what others give you, and you have no choice to reject it, then you better give it some meaning. Gosh, dare I say it – be creative! Your alternative is work that drags you down, and there are few things worse for your energy than that.

Time management often seems to be the issue – but is it really? My own experience tells a different story. Of course, time management is important, especially in the fast-paced...