Here in the US, and I think in corporate environments worldwide, email volume is a significant issue. Shortmail is one of many companies attempting to reduce time spent per email, there’re all kinds of CC- and BCC-based quantity reduction strategies, and Atos wants to remove email altogether.
I’d add sharp email design as a suggested strategy toward efficient and effective communication. The exact same text, well-laid-out, is sure to be far more productive than a big chunk of text.
Here’re a few suggestions to make your next email work for you:
- Start off with an appropriate greeting. A “Hey ___”, “Hi ___”, or “Dear ___” has the visual effect of starting a new conversation and bringing an element of pause into what your recipient is doing.
- Give each new point of your email its own line. The white space helps the content “breathe”, and visually organizes the text for the reader.
- Try to limit these to no more than three. In the middle of a busy day, it’s unlikely most people will be able to quickly reply to an email that asks more than three things of them. (Unless you’re in the middle of a long editing session, and there’s a mutual agreement between you and the reader that each point needs to be read, it’s best to stick to three, and send another email later if needed).
- Put a few words in bold. This is a little risky, as it can come off as rude, but done correctly, your recipient will likely appreciate your attempt to highlight the important information.
- If you need to send a link, use the hyperlink feature, instead of just pasting a long web link into the email.
- End with a short, punchy reprisal of the primary purpose of the email. “I hope to hear from you soon”, “Please send me that document by Friday”, “Please RSVP here”.
I hope these are helpful - if you have any email design tips of your own, please share!
Yesterday marked the end of my first week at General Assembly.
Over just the last seven days, GA has been written about in The New York Times (twice), Fast Company, and at least three different blog posts. And just a week earlier, Financial Times featured General Assembly’s move to London with a quote from none other than Prime Minister David Cameron.
The press is right to be excited. What General Assembly is building is simple in many ways, but incredibly powerful. This is a new model for learning - one that takes the term “return on investment” very seriously. Instead of putting students through a four-year experience that results in an ever-more-dubious chance of employment, General Assembly’s goal is to train students in skills that are directly applicable to the Internet economy. Classes cover everything from technology, to entrepreneurship, to design, with instruction that is as dynamic and fluid as the industry its students hope to join.
But what really excites me about joining this company is something different - it’s the way the team thinks. There’s a thoughtful and deliberate method about it, one that continually attempts to enlarge the scope of a problem, analyze and assess its every facet, and create the most efficient solution, both for the present and the future.
As GA is approached by more and more companies, partners, teachers, media outlets, startups, investors, and students, the company’s founders and team members will be faced with tough questions about strategy, brand, product, pricing, and more. These are challenging, but also thrilling - how we answer and respond will largely determine the success of this venture, and the extent to which we can have an impact on the future of education.
Lydia really knows how to treat a birthday boy.
In 28 years, I’ve never had a better birthday. Here’re a few reasons why:
- Food: We dined at the trendy Fig & Olive, and then as if that wasn’t enough, she managed to score reservations at Del Posto, the ridiculously ostentatious 15-servers-per-table restaurant by Mario Batali.
- Presents: The Thomas Pink shirt in the picture above. Brilliant!
- Friends: Lydia invited my closest New York City friends to an “Anand party”, complete with Malbec, skittles, and hip hop.
- Thought: This one’s most important. I’ve never had someone else organize a birthday party for me. (Well, aside from my mom). Around every birthday experience, Lydia had thought about every detail, from food, to wine, to shirt size, candy, and more.
I love you Lydia. Thanks for everything.
This is a post I wrote for General Assembly, after an interview with Jennifer Fremont-Smith, CEO of Smarterer.
You can read the full text of the post at General Assembly, or at Business Insider.
The series continues every week at General Assembly. Tickets are available HERE.
I’ve recently become quite addicted to a new web service called Smarterer.
Smarterer lets you create and take tests on any subject. Tests are adaptive, and questions are weighted based on your overall scores and that of the person who created them in the first place. It’s a wonderfully dynamic system, and is perfect for the fast growing number of areas, products, and services that we all need to be proficient in.
HERE are my scores. Clearly I have some work to do, but the need to score over 700 (like the GMAT) keeps me coming back to improve. Also, I’ve heard that my scores will drop over time - a manifestation of the assumption that memories fade, and content continues to add and evolve.
As we struggle to keep pace with an ever expanding suite of products and services, Smarterer may just be the resource that helps us prove (and verify) proficiency when we need to.
(The image is just my top scores).
I’ve been having a lot of fun watching Lydia cook.
Don’t get me wrong. I “help”. I chop the onions. I boil the pasta. And I usually do the dishes. But once basic tasks like that are complete, my contribution ends, and I step back to let her make the magic.
It really is fascinating to watch her do it. Cooking is a process that I have approached with much trepidation - following recipes, carefully, specifically measuring out each little ingredient, for fear of getting things wrong. Lydia’s style, on the other hand, is to cook with a confidence and creativity that makes it seem like that big fat book my mom had in the kitchen actually knew what it was talking about.
Lydia will open the spice cabinet, the fridge, and the cupboard and, seemingly randomly, will start adding in ingredients with a “let’s see what this does” kind of experimental mentality. “Maybe some beer will help this bolognese.” “What about some habanero sauce here?”. And always lots of cumin.
And somehow, every time, the result is a rich, and often surprising, palette of flavors that makes dinner come alive.
I love being a small part of the process, and aspire to have her ability myself one of these days.
A note I just sent out:
Dear Friends:
I’m writing to announce that today will be my last day at SCVNGR.
The last year has been fast and exciting, and I’m grateful to have had the chance to work with some of the smartest people in an emerging new area of media and marketing.
Over the next few weeks, I will be focusing on a new initiative - more on that to come soon. In the meantime, I’m reachable at anand@chopra-mcgowan.com, as well as the links below.
Thank you all for your continued support and help. I can’t wait for what’s next.
Cheers,
Anand
Another op-ed demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the Internet works.
Reading this, one would think that “Once upon a time” most people actually sat quietly and pondered.
My hypothesis is that the distribution of intellectualism has been relatively constant, if not a little higher overall today. Media have always been just a means; most people consume quite useless information for pleasure, while some use it to create brilliant ideas.
For all the cures that have been found, products that have been launched, people who have been connected (and re-connected), history that has been uncovered, and movements that have been spurred in just the last few decades, it’s shocking that Mr. Gabler believes there are no big ideas today.
(Warning: This post is a little self-serving)
A little over a month ago, I had the opportunity to teach a class at General Assembly, New York’s fast-growing startup hub.
The room was packed, and the feedback was overall very positive and helpful - I hope the class learned as much from me as I did from them.
Tomorrow, I go back to GA for a second session, this one focused on how to prepare for a pitch meeting. It’s a crucial sales step that’s often overlooked - once you’ve got the meeting scheduled, it’s easy to assume you just have to show up and do your routine. But background research, competitive intelligence, and thorough, well-design presentation material have a huge effect on the success of this meeting.
We’re going to pick through the process, look at the reasons why, and also look at examples of presentation materials from other startups.
Tomorrow’s class is the first of a series of four - I can’t wait to get started.
PS: A couple of self-serving testimonials from participants of last class:
- “Anand’s class was phenomenal. Unlike most other sales classes that only cover high-level concepts and ideas, Anand focused on the logistics of getting the meeting - the persistent and creative tactics required to establish contact with executives” - Malik, Co-Founder, 1DocWay
- Anand’s Startup Sales Strategy course at General Assembly was a valuable experience for me. Anand very succinctly and clearly laid out the algorithms for getting to a first meeting starting with three essentials; be clear, be persistent, be creative. From that foundation the fine tuned alchemy of getting through the door was presented step by step, from preparation and essential tools to prioritizing and best follow-up practices. Anand simply boiled down the process of getting the first yes; I highly recommend it to anyone trying to grow a business or network. - Mark Krassner, Sales Manager & Entrepreneur
I recently read two articulate articles, both deploring the loss of a culture of contemplation and original opinion that has come with the spread of digital content and interaction.
“Once, there was something called a point of view.”, says Neil Strauss in The Wall Street Journal. “…what little memory we had not already surrendered to Gutenberg we have relinquished to Google.”, complains Bill Keller in The New York Times.
Both authors’ views tend toward the same plane - that before the Internet, people used to think, opine, and ponder issues in a distraction-free environment.
Strauss contends that the Internet has built a culture of leaders and followers, making it harder to have a unique point of view. I would argue two things: one, that has always been the case - strong thinkers and prophets with legions of followers, and two, it’s clear that the Internet widens the conversation to those who previously had no access to the material in question, or may have just been too lazy to write a letter to the editor. As an example, I’d refer you to the dozens of opinions in the comments on Strauss’ own article!
Keller’s principal point is that the more thought processes and mental exertion we give up to calculators and search engines, the less contextual and creative our imaginations become. I’ve written about similar thoughts of my own. So while I realize the inherent contradiction here, I think it’s important to emphasize the incredible value the Internet brings in terms of variety, quantity, and access to information. If generations ago people would memorize literature and manually calculate numbers, it also meant that thoughts and topics were far more homogenized and probably a good deal more boring than the average Twitter stream.
For a small subset of people who may previously have lead the discourse and debates of the time, the Internet’s distractive nature and formats of interaction may have caused a certain loss of depth and originality. But for the vast numbers of people would never have commented on a president’s op-ed, created a music video, or published a blog, the richness and value of the Internet cannot be overstated.
