Don't Reply All: 18 Email Tactics That Help You Write Better Emails and Improve Communication with Your Team Paperback – December 11, 2015

Great book and awesome gift for those who want to provide a gift bag for team retreats. Well put together and insightful. Dont reply all!!!

This short book is full of practical advice for the oversubscribed email writer. I immediately applied several of the tactics making my communications much better.

Goo book

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.The tactics 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 adress 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.Hassan Osman has 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. I think his new book Don't Reply All will benefit anybody whose work involves using email for communicating with coworkers and clients.(Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.)

This book was very easy to read, and offered a number of highly practical and easily implemented suggestions for making emails punchier, more likely to be read, and more effective overall. I have implemented a few of the tactics this week and do feel that my communication has improved.The author specifically stated that he reads all reviews so he can improve the book going forward, so I will offer my own suggestion (kind of a pet peeve, but here I'm phrasing it positively): when writing an email that refers the reader to an external shared file such as a G-sheet, *PROVIDE THE LINK* to the shared file right there in your email, no matter how many times you have provided the same link before. As a busy manager, it drives me nuts when folks ask me to update a spreadsheet that is "somewhere out there" and expects me to go find it. Even if I know the exact spreadsheet they are referring to, it is still fewer clicks for me if they provide a link rather than making me navigate to the file myself.Thanks again to the author for a great little book, and I have just purchased the companion volume on managing virtual teams because I'm eager to get his insights on this aspect of my work.

Good reminders

This was a great read. The author got down to business right from the start and gave great advice until the end. The tips in this book have changed my approach to my use of email.

This book is eye-opening in how to approach emails when in the working world when you never got the memo of how to do 'corporate'. It is especially helpful in understanding how to approach editing your emails, as opposed to telling you what to write, like most other texts do.The bonus material provided is also a welcomed upgrade tool that I hope my colleagues and I can use it to increase the potential for better productivity.