One of my primary recommendations is to overshare. But when you overshare, you often overwhelm. In fact, even if you’re not oversharing, your boss or client is likely overwhelmed anyway, with more to do than he has time for.
There are a few consequences of this. One, is my earlier recommendation to put the urgency in an email subject line. Another to ask in the email text for a specific person to respond when emailing multiple people.
Two other consequences are worth diving into.
The first is that this is a great use of the tagging feature, the newer convention (as of this writing!) to use “@” with someone’s name so they’re alerted. This not only alerts them, but it is a now-widely-accepted signal that the person tagged needs to respond. So, it helps both on the convention level (they will know it’s for them), and the technical level (they will get an alert.) Email often accepts this now (Gmail at least), and Slack popularized this in the business use cases.
The second is that, even when you tag someone, they’re likely not to respond. They just have too much to do. It’s not personal, it’s just that there is always a fire or a more urgent priority.
The way to combat that is to keep a list of the times you’ve tagged people and are asking them for something (when you’re waiting for a response.) This way, you know who to follow up with when they don’t respond after a few days.
This feels like a lot of effort, but two things on that. First, it’s overwhelmingly worth it. One of the keys to both success in a work environment and your clients loving you isn’t just being on top of everything, but making sure that things don’t slip through your fingers. And this is a great way to prevent that.
The qualification, however, is that if you did this for every little thing, you’d have no time to do anything else. On the one hand, that’s understandable and a sign of how important this is—go slower on other things because you need to make sure everything is followed-up on. But on the other hand, in the real world, you need to prioritize your time. It makes sense to do this for the more important requests, with the more important people you’re dealing with, with the people more likely to not follow-up on their own. The solution is a balance, so walk the tightrope with care.
