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Hulk SMASH his co-worker... with email

The neighbor’s dog was barking all night and kept you from getting a good nights sleep.  You can’t find your car keys in the morning.  The morning rush traffic was horrible and caused you to be late for work.  You have a list of things to do a mile long and someone took the last of the coffee without making more.  Today, you are a bomb with a short fuse. All it takes is a just a tiny little thing to set you off. You don’t want to cause a scene; that would be unprofessional and could get you fired on the spot.

Most people turn to email as a way to vent because it is non-confrentational and allows you to tell your side of arguement without interruption.  However, this is just as dangerous (if not more) than arguing in the office.  You need to think of a hateful email as a transcription for a verbal fight.  Everything is documented and can be used against you with very little room for debate.  Also, most companies are required to track email usage leaving your temporary moment of rage neatly preserved for years to come.

There is a very simple way you can prevent these emails from happening:

• Never fill in the To:, Cc:, or Bc: fields until the email has been composed

It’s that simple.  Most people are in the habit of filling out the recipients, writing a subject, composing the email, and then clicking send.  Skipping the recipients will throw an error if you try to hit send immediately after an email is writen.  This will give you time to (calm down) and proof your email before you click send.

If you use Gmail, sign into your account and head over to the Gmail Labs.  It’s the icon at the top right of the browser page in Gmail and looks like this .

There are lots of cool options in there, but there are to in particular that help prevent sending emails hastily:

Mail Googles by Jon P

Google strives to make the world’s information useful. Mail you send late night on the weekends may be useful but you may regret it the next morning. Solve some simple math problems and you’re good to go. Otherwise, get a good night’s sleep and try again in the morning. After enabling this feature, you can adjust the schedule in the “General” settings page.

Undo Send by Yuzo F

Oops, hit “Send” too soon? Stop messages from being sent for a few seconds after hitting the send button.

Jason IT Best Practices email, hate, mean, prevent, tip