ohryan.ca

This post is someone related to the part v in the series, subject lines.

The subject of the email should reflect the topic of the body. When replying to an email thread, you should only reply with content relevant to the main topic. Do not ask an unrelated question, or start writing about what you had for lunch.

If you have a new topic, compose a new email!

It may not be entirely obvious why this sucks, I’m going to go into a little more detail than usual. This sucks because it makes it impossible to reference the email in the future. When I do a search for something, I usually ignore subjects that don’t pertain to my search. If I give the thread a label based on the content, when I reference the label in the future I will probably think it has been incorrectly labeled. It also makes it more difficult to resolve the email thread. It is also more likely to spin out of control, especially if there are a lot of CC’er in on the thread (see: PS@E IV).

Lay off that reply-all button.

Subject lines are hard. Your subject line can fail if it is:

1. Not descriptive enough. Tell me what the email is about, I need to know whether to read it, file it or delete it without reading the body.
2. Too long. I need to be able to read the subject on my mobile device and gmail cuts subjects after about 12 words. Gmail is just being generous though, 12 words is far too long. I’d suggest less than 6.
3. Too short. One word is not (usually) going to be descriptive enough.
4. Full of “Re:” and/or “Fwd:” more than one of either is too much, they waste valuable character real estate.

As a rule of thumb, try to use 3 – 6 descriptive words. An extra word or two –  surrounded by separator like a pair of braces – for a tag is also acceptable if you need that for your GTD filters.