heartharmony.com.au

OK … I admit it. I am not an admin guru. I have moments of amazing lapses of systems and processes and make some brilliantly spectacular stuff ups.

My best ones seem to all revolve around my itchy email trigger finger – so in the interests of sharing my human side here are a few of my better ones from the past few weeks so you can have a laugh/cringe with me (and take away some of my lessons).

Check your email addresses really carefully before hitting send. My email contacts list is massive, so it was bound to happen – but I now have clients and support team members with remarkably similar names.

In the past fortnight an email destined for my accountant ended up with a client of the same first name and same first last surname letter. As luck would have it this client is also an accountant (but on the other side of Australia). Once we worked out what had happened we could have a laugh about it and catch up with each other’s businesses … but it did give me a few OMG cringe-worthy moments.

My Virtual Assistant has the first name and similar initials to another of my favourite clients – so my VA ended up with the material and handouts I completed for my client on a Menopause seminar she is presenting this weekend. My VA thought I was subtly trying to tell her something about needing HRT!

Save documents before attaching them. This should be a no brainer – you should save the document you are working on before you attach them in an email.

But when you are a freelance writer you just can’t help making one more edit, one more edit, one more edit – gee gotta send it now to make the deadline. Doh!

One of the documents I had recently been working on hadn’t been saved with all of the edits prior to sending – which meant the document was full of typos, spelling errors and gaps. Of course the version in my file was fine as it auto-saved on closing the document. My client didn’t pick up on the issue – but I did when I had a funny hunch that I followed to work out what had happened. It was the ultimate example of “before” editing and “after” editing and why we edit our work.

I suspect the common theme through all of these is to make sure brain is in gear before hitting the send button.  We get so used to quickly responding to situations and events via email that I know that sometimes I get email trigger happy to get through my 100+ emails a day.

I have already set my email to only send and receive when I click the button rather than auto-send because I know I have this malady … I just now need to build in a further “Are you really sure” button!

What do you do to manage your email trigger finger?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

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Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer