PAASTUB Email Process-Step 5: Take Out the Trash

“Take out the trash” from your emails means to remove all unnecessary text before sending. Take a little bit of extra time to improve clarity and focus readers on just what is important for accomplishing your purpose.

The seven PAASTUB steps are:

Step 1: Purpose is Clear: a clear purpose (outcome in mind) is necessary for effective email

Step 2: Action: make it easy for readers to learn what you want

Step 3: Audience: keep the right people informed

Step 4: Subject as Art: make the content clear from the subject alone

(you are here) Step 5: Take Out the Trash: make the message easy to read quickly

Step 6: Ugly Remarks Edited: keep yourself and others out of trouble

Step 7: BLUF-ing: focus attention with a concise summary

This post describes step 5 of the PAASTUB (pronounced “paystub”) email process: Take Out the Trash. It includes:

◦ examples of superfluous email text,

◦ what can happen when you don’t remove this trash,

◦ the benefits when you do take out the trash, and

◦ how to add someone new to an ongoing email discussion.

When you send an email, only include the most important information necessary to accomplish your purpose. Step 5 of the PAASTUB process, Take Out the Trash, helps your readers focus.

Getting focus on your text is challenging when you forward or reply to an email you received. After just a few forwards and replies, only a fraction of the text of most emails is relevant to readers. I consider email trash to be anything beyond just what you need others to know to accomplish your purpose. Email trash includes:

◦ recipient address headers from prior emails (except the “from”),

◦ prior subjects,

◦ entire emails that don’t add information,

◦ all salutations (“Dear Bob,”),

◦ all email signatures and contact information,

◦ disclaimers and privacy warnings (“this email is intended for …”) and

◦ any text that is no longer germain (“How are you? I am doing fine except my house burned down and I have to sleep under a tree. Here is the information you requested …” This may have mattered for Kevin’s email to Bob, but not for your message).

Why bother taking the trash out of previous emails? First, it can take a lot of mental energy and focus to study an email to understand what the action is and what prior information is relevant, particularly for long email threads. This isn’t what you want. You want recipients of your emails to quickly grasp the action and focus on giving you just what you need. When you spare readers this effort, you simplify their mental effort so they can focus on what’s important, which you decided before you sent the email. Mental effort is scarcer than short meetings in many business environments. Second, you are the best person to filter the extraneous information. You have studied the email enough to know what is important for others to know and what isn’t. Third, it is more efficient. You do the work once instead of expecting twelve other people to do it on their own. Fourth, very few people take the trash out of messages they send. Removing unnecessary text makes the brevity and clarity of your emails really stand out. You may not get feedback about this at first, but people will notice.

An important corollary to taking taking out the trash is providing specific assistance to people you decide to add as new participants in an email thread. When you add someone new to a long string of email messages, you should add a sentence or two that summarizes the previous communications: what the problem is and the concerns or positions of others. I use text like “For Bob: I included you because … and the key points are …” You should use a bulleted list for the key points. I have been added to email discussions and been unable to determine why or what the sender expected me to do. The common practice of adding “FYI” at the top of the message is useless because that puts the entire burden on the reader to figure out why the information what the action is or why the email is useful. If I couldn’t determine what the “information” was or how it was relevant to me in 30 seconds, I replied to the sender with a brief message, polite message like “I don’t understand what you expect me to do with this. Please explain more.”

For more details about removing unnecessary text in emails and a full explanation of each of the seven steps, consider purchasing my book “How to: Become an Email Ninja,” $9.99 for the Kindle edition https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086XMJJ75. My next post on email will summarize Step 6 of the PAASTUB process: Ugly Remarks Edited to make your emails more professional and avoid pain and embarrassment. The last thing you need is more pain.