by Joe Wallace

Take a good look at the picture and try to figure out what’s wrong with it.

If you have trouble spotting it at first, don’t feel too badly–the image is so tiny you probably missed it the first time, but look again. Nobody in their right mind would actually put a full coffee cup ON their laptop the way this one is. It’s an invitation for disaster all right, and anybody with morning brain could easily knock over a cup of java–especially where THIS one is placed.

Seems sort of dumb not only to put a coffee cup on a laptop, but then to take a PHOTO of it, to boot. Somebody thought this looked great, but didn’t think about the implications. (And before you ask, I’m the one who took that photo. On purpose. It amused me, but stupid things like this do before I’ve had enough caffeine.)

But it does prove a point—it’s easy to overlook something terribly obvious in the rush to get the goods. How many times have we ALL hit “send” on that e-mail before proofreading it? When you find out later that you dropped a “the” or mangled your recipient’s name, the rest of the day is spent kicking yourself until you’re too sore to sit.

I catch e-mail marketers out all the time. You know the ones–they’re trying very hard not to make their sales pitch read like a form letter, but they forget to snip out some crucial part of the e-mail they sent to the last poor schlub. Your “personalized” e-mail has somebody else’s information in it. Or just plain wrong info. “I’d love to help you promote your purple envelope business, Mrs. Wallace.”

Tee hee.

Then there’s the way you get burned when you’ve hit “reply”. Or rather, you THINK you’ve hit “reply”. Instead you hit “reply all”. Then you accidentally send that candid message about your crappy lunch break to someone you really didn’t intend to contact. Whoops.

I’ve made a fool of myself enough to teach myself a couple of tricks in this department.

1. I never hit “reply” anymore unless I’m able to reply to EVERYONE in the e-mail. I always initiate a new e-mail. Sounds obvious, but it’s not–otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation here and now.

2. I proofread my e-mails. This might seem excessively nitpicky, but now that it’s a habit and I do it with ALL e-mail, I tend not to send out things that have flaws, errors, unintended recipients and other not-ready-for-prime-time problems.

3. I walk away from e-mail for 10 minutes or so before replying to bad news, things that make me angry, or information that increases my work load. For me, the time away gives me a moment to think through everything.

4. I always re-read the last paragraph of everything I write one last time before I declare it finished and hit “send”. For some reason, people tend to forget tact most at the end of an e-mail. I like to catch that sort of thing when I can.

5. I try not to assume people know what I’m talking about or even remember conversations we’ve had about what I’m getting in touch for. It makes life so much easier to give a little road map (in a nice and tactful way) just in case.

6. I try to write e-mails and cover letters with the assumption that the reader hasn’t had any coffee yet.