41–50 of 70 posts
It's not for me you understand, it's for a friend.
Perhaps, over the last two months you've been running the experiment, you've been thinking about actually wanting a response and have automatically been constructing better emails that people feel they can reply to. Unlike the "brain-dump" ones I sometimes get that just don't deserve a response. To be perfectly honest, if there's more than one person on the email, I'm more likely to hope it's not my problem...
isn't there a name for that? something like diffusion of responsibility. the same reason we don't help one person in trouble when there's more than one potential helper...
Very cool experiment, kudos, and i can see why it works. But did you actually say in the emails "ccing my assistant?" Even if you didn't i am not sure how legal it would be. Just by ccing someone, you mislead the other party, eg that you have someone else in your company. Of course the argument for "don't use for important emails" is invalid, why you can mislead some and not others? And when in doubt, i say no.
They'd be able to see that anyway. It's not the same as BCC.
So, assuming one was a lazy slacker and wanted all their email to fall into a black hole for the purpose of work avoidance, have you got any advice other than "always mail people without CC?" It's not for me you understand, it's for a friend.
Never reply-to-all.
No subject.
Perhaps, over the last two months you've been running the experiment, you've been thinking about actually wanting a response and have automatically been constructing better emails that people feel they can reply to. Unlike the "brain-dump" ones I sometimes get that just don't deserve a response. To be perfectly honest, if there's more than one person on the email, I'm more likely to hope it's not my problem...
So to design a better controlled experiment, the OP should write a statistically significant number of emails (>100...maybe 1000+) without sending them. An app should perform a double-blind study by randomly choosing half those emails to go to multiple recipients (all but one being fake) and choosing the other half to go to one recipient only. Anyone see any holes in this approach?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I don't use priority inbox.
I think he means that it might have an effect on other people's priority inbox. It could be that if an incoming E-Mail has another recipient, GMail thinks this E-Mail might be more important and place it in the priority inbox.
I know for a fact that most of those contacted do not use Gmail. Only one confirmedly does.
There might be other corporate non-public solutions that do that, on the other hand.
Has anything about your role, the work you're doing or the success or otherwise of your company changed in the past two months?
i have a client who was a small 2-person startup before they got acquired. They were both doing client facing calls and emails with big multinationals trying to sell a large product inside a typical 100-200 person division. So they created a few fake personas in order to make it look like they could afford a support staff. It's fun to reply all and know that one of the cc'ed people doesn't exist.