E8 – Email Writing Is Not like DIY! We Simply Can’t Be Bad at It

Unfortunately, email writing isn’t like DIY. We have to be good at it. We can’t put it off or avoid it altogether. Also, we can’t just pay someone with better tools and skills to do it for us.

Each person receives about 87 of them a day. Emails are, therefore, a huge part of our working lives. We spend hours each day trawling through our inboxes.  They are an essential tool. Yet, we were never really trained on how to use them. Listen to our latest podcast to learn some practical email writing tips to help you improve your email effectiveness.

Read the Transcript Below:

“I’d like to tell you a sticky story about a house alarm and how I think that relates to your emails. My name is Darren Smith and you’re at the home of sticky learning. MBM, Making Business Matter trainers to the UK grocery industry. My name is Darren Smith. I worked in corporate for a very long time for one of the big supermarkets and then about 16 years ago I set up founded MBM, we do soft skills training.”

“Many years ago we lived in a house when we were a young family and we decided that we needed a house alarm. There weren’t any particular burglaries in the area, but we wanted to be safe so we didn’t get a guy in or we didn’t get one professionally fitted. I thought I’m in my early thirties I can do this. I should be able to do it yet, I know that my DIY skills are poor.”

The Alarm..

“Anyway, we move on. We bought a Yale alarm. Imagine a great big box turning up a few days later. Rip the lid off. It’s about the size of the kitchen table and it’s full of this house alarm from PIR detectors to the great big yellow box that goes on the front of the house that says Yale, hopefully, to deter any would-be burglars.”

“So I get up one Saturday morning and I know in the back of my mind that DIY is not my thing, but I’m quite determined and I’m motivated to sort this because I think I can. So I spend too long figuring out how to put this alarm together and getting it to work with the house. And you can imagine there’s me with a step ladder, a ladder, a drill, screws. It’s awful. The drill is probably 10, 15 years old. I still got it now.”

“The drill bits are broken, the screwdrivers are blunt. They are not the tools of a professional work person. So I’m there outside the house and the step ladder and the ladder won’t reach high enough to put this box where I wanted it to go at the top of the wall. But I’ve got one foot on the top of the ladder and I’m sort of dangling, hanging onto the window seal with my left hand and in my right hand I̵