email

How to email the person you want

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Be careful with this. People who keep their email addresses quiet usually do so because otherwise they get writers like us bombarding them. But if you and I are the only ones who figure out their addresses, we’re not a bombard.

Nonetheless, use this when you are sure it is your best way to reach someone. Also, it won’t always work. And, last cautious bit, this is how to find their address: it isn’t what you should say to them.

Are you still here?

Right, do this.

You’re looking for Alan Phabet and you know he works at Dewey Decimal Ltd.

Google up the company’s website and go there. Look for Alan’s email address as, afterall, if it’s there, your job is done. Most likely the only email address you’ll see is a generic enquiries@deweydecimal.com. That will be the one they push in front of you. If they have the company phone number, ring them and ask for Alan’s email address.

Again, if that works, job done. Assuming it doesn’t, though, go back online and google exactly this, including the quote marks:

“@deweydecimal.com” at www.deweydecimal.com

That searches for every email address listed anywhere on that particular site. Yet again, if you find “alphabet@deweydecimal.com”, job done.

Most likely, you will get a few different addresses and none will be the one you need. But you’ll see that Noreen Umber’s email is number@deweydecimal.com, for instance, and Edward Xavier Cel’s is excel@deweydecimal.com. If I saw that, I’d take a shot at Alan Phabet’s address being aphabet@deweydecimal.com.

It might not be, though. Maybe you will have to try it and hope, but you can check it out a little bit more. Go back to Google and this time search thisaway, again including the quote marks:

“aphabet@deweydecimal.com”

That searches the entire web for that email address and sometimes, there it is. Alan’s written extensively in some professional journal and he’s given his email address because he wants those readers to contact him.

Professional journals or anything like that can be useful in this stuff. LinkedIn is surprisingly good too: you’re meant to use that service to find who you have in common and get them to introduce you but sometimes you also get a lot of detail from a straight search.

I’ll not say this all depends on luck because it’s really about how you and the person you’re trying to reach works. But if you are very unlucky and the sole thing you can find is that tedious enquiries@deweydecimal.com, there are still two things you can do.

I’d say the first thing is to phone the company back and this time ask to speak to Alan Phabet. Be ready to make your pitch, whatever it is, in case you do get him. But more often, you’ll get an assistant. Pitch to them, if it feels like they’re willing to spend a moment with you. Ask them for Alan’s address. They might give you their own address in which case email them immediately with thanks and your pitch for Alan.

And last, if they won’t give you any address or if whoever answers the phone won’t put you through, go back to the website and that tedious enquiries address. You never know, it might work for you.

One quick side tip: when you’re first checking out a company’s website, if you find a newsletter or anything where you can sign up to be notified of things, sign up immediately. I had a thing where I did that and when I phoned the company a moment later, the producer said something like “Oh, hello” – because she’d just been reading to see who this guy was who had signed up on her site. By the time I rang, she was on my website and that was like she was pitching me to herself.

Quickly get tasks out of your emails

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This happens. Someone sends you a giant email full of personal detail, personal conversation between the pair of you, and oh, in the middle, there’s a job they need doing. Actually, it’s a job where you need to ask someone something for them.

Highlight that bit. Just that bit. Only that sentence. Now hit Forward.

Practically whatever email system you use, you will now have in front of you a brand new email message with that highlighted text and nothing else.

You didn’t have to copy and paste, your email just did it for you. Address the email, send it off, done.

If that one email has several tasks for many people, do this to each one. Highlight, forward, send. Highlight, forward, send.

If it’s a task for you and your To Do app can handle this, you could do exactly the same thing but email the task into your app. OmniFocus users get a secret email address for precisely this job. And I use the bejaysis out of it. Highlight, forward a task to OmniFocus, done.

Save your emails into Evernote for quicker searching

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I’m not convinced by this because Mail in OS X is quick at finding things but I can see a lot of advantages to saving emails into Evernote because it’s a good pot for all things. It’s a good place to save everything and know that it’s all there, to know that everything you save is therefore everywhere you go.

But the official Evernote blog is persuasive about all this – and has a lot of tips for how to do it. Take a read, would you?

IFTTT adds an email digest channel

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If you read that heading and knew what IFTTT stands for, you've just understood the entire story. Move along. Nothing more to see here. (But check out IFTTT's own announcement for the details.)

I do know that it stands for If This Then That and I do use the service but at such a low level that I forget it's there. If I mark somebody's tweet as a favourite, for instance, I know that If This Then That has been set up to automatically save that tweet to an Evernote note of mine. But I can't remember how I did that, I don't remember when I set it up, and I hardly remember that it's there: I just tap that Favourite button and forget about it.

So I'm not the best guy to tell you about any new IFTTT channel – any new thing you can control via IFTTT – and I don't usually try. But this one looks good:

“We’re thrilled to introduce a powerful Channel that everyone can use — no activation necessary. The new Email Digest Channel collects the content you care about and delivers it on a daily or weekly basis.

IFTTT Blog

The examples include getting the service to email you the weather report every day. Or if there's a new free app on the App Store, email you about that. (Somebody's really done that. Are they mad?) Take a look at the short IFTTT announcement and then follow its links to what people are already doing with this. If you see something you like, a few taps and a sign-in get it working for you. For free.

Take that, email-as-To-Do-list people

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Previously on The Blank Screen… Cult of Mac writer Charlie Sorrell argued that you should stick to email (and a few other things) for your To Do list. I shook. I had to have tea. But in the same spirit of showing you Sorrell’s arguments when I don’t agree with them, I want to show you other people saying much the same as I do about how this is A TERRIBLE IDEA AND THEN SOME.

A to-do list contains only items you put on it. Your inbox, on the other hand, is like a spout with no spigot. You have no control over incoming items, except to consider them one by one and delete them—a highly ineffective way to cultivate a to-do list. Messages turn up at all hours of the day. They can come from anyone with no regard to the hierarchy that may determine your actual to-do list. And more likely than not, only a fraction of them will reflect what you need to get done.

Jill Duffy, PC Mag (12 March 2012)

and

If you’re conflating email and task management, then the job of simply communicating–reading and replying to your messages–gets bogged down by all the emails you leave sitting in your inbox simply so you won’t forget to address them. (And there are probably a few to-do reminders in there that you sent to yourself!) This approach also makes managing your to-do-list problematic: when you need to quickly identify the right task to take on next, nothing slows you down like diving into your inbox to scroll through old messages.

Alexandra Samuel, Harvard Business Review (7 March 2014)

There. I’ll shut up now. Probably.

Use your email as a To Do manager (no, no, no)

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There is no right or wrong way to get productive, but sometimes it feels like there is. Here’s an article for you if you fancy using your email inbox as your To Do list. I bring this to you and what you do with it is of course entirely up to you, but I’ll be off way over here with tea, a mint chocolate Aero and saying la la la. For:

They say your email inbox is a terrible place to manage tasks. I’d disagree. I think it’s the perfect place. After all, most of my tasks come in via email, and any app that can share information can share it via email. Why bother dickering with an extra app, keeping all that important stuff in two places, when it can all be easily managed in one spot?

I’ve been doing exactly this ever since I ditched OmniFocus, which is so long ago I can’t remember how long ago it was.

Wait, what, whoa, excuse me? Ditching OmniFocus – OMNIFOCUS – for your email inbox. Can I get some whisky for this tea?

Also, incidentally, I say your email inbox is a terrible place to manage tasks. That means I am they. I’ve never been they before. I can live with this.

Anyway, here’s the crux and the thrust of the article:

With a little bit of setup in your everyday news and browsing apps, you can turn your inbox into a proper universal task list. Here’s how.

This tutorial will use your email account, Mr. Reader (for RSS news items), Twitterrific and Drafts, plus one simple mail rule to organize things behind the scenes. You can gussy things up with all kinds of extras, but the core system is both solid and flexible. Like I say, I’ve been using it for months and it’s way better than anything else I’ve tried.
Email is ubiquitous, so it’s the perfect place to keep your task list.

If you make use of lots of separate projects, or have specific needs for metadata and GTD contexts, then maybe you should stick with something like OmniFocus or Things. But you’d be surprised just how far my mail-based system can stretch.

Okay, writer Charlie Sorrell gets points for that small reversal and allowing that proper To Do managers have their place. But points are removed for saying you can use one spot rather than muck around with two apps and then casually mentioning you actually need four. (Twitterrific, Drafts, Mr Reader and your email.)

But go on, if you must, read more at Cult of Mac.

By the way, did I mention that doing this could create aparadox, the results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space time continuum, and destroy the entire universe? Granted, that’s a worse case scenario.