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Don’t Reply All: 18 Email Tactics That Help You Write Better Emails and Improve Communication with Your Team, by Hassan Osman

2015-12-13 by Roberto Zoia Leave a Comment

Buy from Amazon

Don’t Reply All: 18 Email Tactics That Help You Write Better Emails and Improve Communication with Your Team, by Hassan Osman

Hassan Osman has a vast experience managing projects with large, geographically distributed teams. His previous book, Influencing Virtual Teams, offered no-nonsense tactics to help you managing your team.

Despite the huge advances in communications and the little improvement in email systems, email is here to stay. And it makes sense, because email remains one of the most effective and frictionless form of communications.

Reading, writing, and answering emails consumes a significant amount of everybody’s time.
According to a 2012 McKinsey study cited by Osman, the average US worker spends 28% of his/her workweek reading and responding to email. Most people recognize that they should do something about how they deal with mail, the actual number of people taking some real action is small.

This book is not about managing your inbox –no “inbox zero” pretentions here–, but about down-to-earth tactics to help you and your team become better and more effective communicators. The value of the book is not in its novelty –“There’s nothing earth-shattering about the contents of this book. In fact, many of my tips are common sense that you’ve probably read somewhere before”– but in that it offers proven best practices that you can adopt immediately, and that you can share with your team immediately.

The tactics described in Don’t Reply All can be divided in two groups, tactics 1 to 5 being the most important and effective ones. “If you take away a handful of lessons from this entire book, they should be those five tactics. They are your 80/ 20—the 20% of actions that will produce 80% of your results.”

These 5 tactics are about how to write meaninful subject lines, keeping the content of your emails short and to the point, and assigning tasks using the “3W”s:

  • The Who. Use the name of a single person of the name of the persons, don’t address people using “all”, “team”, etc.
  • The What. Don’t be ambiguous and avoid making assumptions.
  • The When. The exact time and date a task needs to be completed by. Always use a deadline, even if it’s fake.

The remaining 13 tactics in the book cover other no-nonsense advice like why you should steer away from asking open-ended questions in mails, how to use delayed delivery for sending emails when they are most likely to be read, and the maybe the most important one: do not hit reply-all when only the original sender needs to read your message.

I think that anybody whose work involves using email for communicating with coworkers and clients will greatly benefit from the tactics offered in this book.

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: book review, communication, effectiveness, email, productivity, team building

First impressions

2014-07-01 by Roberto Zoia Leave a Comment

Some weeks ago, we needed to hire a designer –not a web designer– for a job. We had a list of names with good references and recommendations from other people. As expected, we searched for them on Google.

Surprisingly, from a total of ten, only two had a web page. For others, Google search results revealed little more than their personal Facebook page. In one case, you could see some cute pictures of her family’s vacation to Disney World, but no information on how to contact them professionally. Another one LinkedIn’s profile was almost empty.

If you run a personal business or are a freelancer, here is a list of basic things you should do if you take it seriously:

(Disclaimer: none of the following are affiliate links, and I am not related to any of the companies although I use some of the services mentioned.)

1. Get a domain name for your business

Domains are cheap ($15/year for a .com domain). If you are a freelancer, see if it makes sense to register your own name.

If you live in Perú (where I live), .pe domain names are registered by punto.pe. They are not cheap (around $44/year, compared to around $15/year for a .com domain), but they are the only registrars in Peru.

The upside with a .pe domain is that you can probably find many more names available than .com domains.

2. Consider having a webpage

You need a webpage to put information about your business, your background, and your portfolio of clients if it is relevant to your business. What you do, why you do, how you do it… This is what people wil find when they google for your business, for services related to it, or for your name.

Like your mail, this webpage must be under your business domain name, not under a free service like tumblr or the free tier of WordPress.

Some people ask me if I know a ‘programmer’ who can help them build their website, and a good hosting service. Don’t do this. Webpages for small to medium businesses is a problem has already been already solved by companies like SquareSpace. WordPress.com also offers convenient plans and take care of hosting and maintaining the platform up to date. (You can check some facts about WordPress and its impact on the internet on Broadbandsearch.)

For $96 a year, SquareSpace offers a simple interface for building a professional-looking webpage, with most of the funcionality you would expect. If this is over your budget, then at least create a Facebook Page sepparated from your personal profile. Unless you are freelancing, have a LinkedIn Page exclusively for your business.

3. Use an email address under your business domain

Get an email for your business domain name and use it in your business cards and everywhere business related. That is, don’t print juanitoperez85@gmail.com, but use info@johndoe.com, or john@johndoe.com.

Google used to offer up to 10 mails for free for custom domains via Google Apps. They don’t anymore. But there are alternatives. Some registrars like hover.com offer a ‘forward only’ email address for domains registered with them for a small fee. (That is, all mail that arrives to info@johndoe.com is automatically forwarded to john_doe@gmail.com.)

If you are willing to pay for a professional mail service, you can pay $5/month for Google Apps for email and other services. A good alternative is fastmail.fm.

You should answer mail sent to your business address within one business day.


Having a professional-looking presence on the Internet has become very affordable. If you have an excellent product or service, there is no excuse for giving a poor first impression to your customers.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: branding, communication, perception

People don’t buy what you do, people buy why you do it

2013-01-09 by Roberto Zoia Leave a Comment

Thanks to a friend, I recently rediscovered Simon Sinek’s talk How great leaders inspire action. Sinek explains a pattern inspiring leaders and organizations follow when communicating ideas, which he calls the golden circle. Great leaders don’t talk about what they are doing, but about why they do it.

Why? How? What? This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren’t. (…) Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 percent. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. And by “why” I don’t mean “to make a profit.” That’s a result. It’s always a result.
By “why,” I mean: What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care? Well, as a result, the way we think, the way we act, the way we communicate is from the outside in. It’s obvious. We go from the clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. But the inspired leaders and the inspired organizations — regardless of their size, regardless of their industry — all think, act and communicate from the inside out.

It is important to know what motivates1 you —why you do things– not only because it is a great way to communicate and inspire. Knowing why we do things affects profoundly how we do them and what things we do and don’t do.


  1. Why you do things is sometimes called external mission in organizations. ↩

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: communication, external mission, inspiration, internal mission, leadership, motivation

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