Please Don’t Send “See Below”
Email threads have got to be one of the worst possible forms of communication. You've been here before. A perfectly respectable morning is passing by. You're working through your items at a chipper pace maybe humming a song you heard on Spotify that morning. Then, the dreaded email thread comes through.
Innocently, you click into the top email. The only text is "[Your Name] see below."
I hate this and I bet you do too.
Suddenly, you're transported into absolute chaos.
You're now a corporate archeologist and firefighter all in one. Forced to decode the two week long thread of baloney while being asked to complete some ambiguous task.
Well, guess what? I don't read them, not anymore.
If an email thread comes in that's longer than a few paragraphs, you're going straight to Copilot. It gets to decipher the weeks long back and forth bickering to get to what I need to know.
Please, please - stop email threads.
Emails: Written communication that needs to be documentable or a complex task
Documentation (Confluence, Word, etc.): Repeatable process and procedures or recordings of key decisions
IM (Teams, Slack, etc.): Actual communication
Meetings: In the best possible way, arguing. If we meet and cannot possibly disagree, then it should have been an email.
Save a vibe today and send an IM instead of an email thread.