Someone was having a Bad Day...

Sometimes you think you are having a bad day and then something happens that makes you see it could always be worse.

An assistant sent me and other recipients an e-mail proposing a date for a meeting. The first e-mail she sent she put the wrong year.

In the next e-mail she sent, she again sent it to all the recipients and corrected the year, but forgot the attachment she said was in the e-mail.

She tried a third time and proposed a new date for the meeting, but when I checked to see if my boss was available that day, I noticed it was a Saturday.

Unfortunately, each time she corrected her e-mail, she pressed Reply to All and everyone on her distribution list saw her attempts to correct her mistakes. We all make mistakes, but we don't need to let everyone know about them. I would have carefully checked my information before pressing Reply to All or if she was trying to do this in a rush she might have been better to wait and send it the next day when she could look at it more carefully.

Untangling the string of e-mail

Sometimes our e-mails get very long with the conversation that is going back and forth. I realize that you do need to keep some of the conversation in there to get the whole story, however, I find in both business and personal e-mails that a little clean up would help. Here are a few good tips from the E-mail Etiquette Matters blog when using Reply to All.