Koom Valley

Spending a year doing production work for Aspyr taught me a lot. The first lesson I learned was how to write email. The second lesson I learned was how to write email. The third was how to read email, and the fourth was how to write email.

Starting to notice a trend here?

Communication is the lifeblood of any organization, with it the beast will thrive and without it there will be an atrophy of thought. Email has done more to change communication than any thing since the invention of the telephone. It’s also something not taught in school. There they focus almost exclusively on formal writing which, while useful, isn’t that great for the types of information communicated in business.

With that in mind, I’m starting this series of posts summing up many of the lessons that I was forced to learn. Hopefully I can convey enough of these lessons that other people will be helped and maybe even save myself a few headaches in the future.

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The first lesson for email is READ.

If you haven’t read the email you’re replying to then your answer is probably going to be worthless. Here is an example email chain paraphrasing some real world lack of communication. The information is real but the names have been changed to protect the author.

The conversation has been condensed down to a chat room style just to reduce the excess whitespace.

Jon: Craig, we got the tool but can’t make heads or tails of it. Can you send us the documentation?

Craig: The documentation is on the wiki.

Jon: Craig, we still need the information on how to use the tool. The team at GameCompany isn’t on your network, so we can’t look at the wiki.

Craig: All the information you need to use the tool is on the wiki. Here’s a link to the correct page. http://internal.link/

Jon: Craig, we don’t have access to the wiki. Could you cut and paste the information for us?

Craig: Oh, have you talked to IT about that? Your team needs access to the wiki.

As I said, this was a real conversation and demonstrates an entire day wasted because someone didn’t read an email before responding.

If you’re having a busy day, I assure you that it will take less time to fully read an email and then reply to it than to send 5 others explaining things that could have been communicated in the first one.