We have all grown used to e-mail. It's part of our daily lives. Many of us are using it on the go, in transport, anywhere, and at anytime. I have even known people in Canada who were using e-mail on their blackberries while brushing their teeth! But does this mean that we are using it properly?

worst practice number eight: the reply-to-all syndrome

I can still see a lot of people hitting the reply-to-all button instead of the reply or forward button when they are communicating back to the person which sent an e-mail message to a community. When you're working on a project and there are probably more than a hundred persons involved, who cares whether this person or the other is actually booking this or that hotel? No one really. Please avoid annoying people by using the reply-to-all button indiscriminatingly and keeping private responses private.

A little funny anecdote I witnessed once in a large Corporation the name of which I will keep secret: A user sent an e-mail to the entirety of his department (a hundred people) to inform them of his forthcoming departure and telling them about how happy he had been when working for this department in the past two years. One of the addresses commented on e-mail by adding 'good riddance' to the original message but instead of forwarding the message to the one person that he wanted to share his relief with (forward button), he sent it to the entirety of the addressees of the e-mail, including the originator (reply-to-all button). It's amazing what havoc a simple blunder can generate.

worst practice number nine: e-mail ping-pong

If you're trying to solve a problem by e-mail, and you have seen the e-mail bounce back at you more than once or twice, then I would urge you to ask yourself this question: could this problem be solved by phone more easily? If the answer to this question is no, then go on exchanging e-mails which are piling up on one another and generating more misunderstandings and more frustration at every stage.

My recommended strategy for this item is to avoid e-mail ping-pong at all cost, and favour personal communications instead. When misunderstandings crop up, it is also because written communication sometimes imply that people read things but do not understand them in the same way as the originator. Confusion arises, and frustration is generated too. E-mail ping-pong is a waste of time, and got knows there is a lot of this kind of sport going on.

worse practice number ten: too many people commenting on an original e-mail

This is the kind of problem that happens very often when people are working on a project. Somebody sends some sort of specification or statement of requirement, and then project members start commenting on it: John adds his comments and marks them with stars (***), Judy marks hers with her initials, Paul with >>> etc. In the beginning, it's nice because every one can still trace the comments and see what everybody else has added. Similarly, adding word attachments when the 'track changes' function has been enabled can help too for the 'track changes' function on Winword is actually very useful. But once again it can become unreadable after a few passes.

If you can't make sense of this e-mail any more, maybe it's a sign that you have either to organise a meeting or a webconference, or even possibly set up a Wiki (check the amazing wetpaint system for instance). I must admit that this is now a lot easier than it used to be even a few years ago, when wikis did not exist. They are now widespread in the corporate world. In this day and age it's so easy to set up a wiki for a project, or a Microsoft Sharepoint collaboration space for instance, that you should consider using collaborative spaces above everything else when it comes to statements of requirements, comments, changes, and all the documentation related to projects so that everybody can see them in a transparent fashion. In that way will increase communication dramatically, and you will avoid filling e-mail boxes, which is a much more efficient way of working. E-mail is not suited to project work for 2 main reasons: for one, e-mail is asynchronous and project work implies a lot of synchronous communication to avoid misunderstandings. Secondly, projects require transparency and capitalisation whereas e-mail history is private and hidden.