Tak-tak-tak-tak

Save Our Inboxes! Adopt the Email Charter!

anomaly-anonymous:

1. Respect Recipients’ Time
This is the fundamental rule. As the message sender, the onus is on YOU to minimize the time your email will take to process. Even if it means taking more time at your end before sending.

2. Short or Slow is not Rude
Let’s mutually agree to cut each other some slack. Given the email load we’re all facing, it’s OK if replies take a while coming and if they don’t give detailed responses to all your questions. No one wants to come over as brusque, so please don’t take it personally. We just want our lives back!

3. Celebrate Clarity
Start with a subject line that clearly labels the topic, and maybe includes a status category [Info], [Action], [Time Sens] [Low Priority]. Use crisp, muddle-free sentences. If the email has to be longer than five sentences, make sure the first provides the basic reason for writing. Avoid strange fonts and colors.

4. Quash Open-Ended Questions
It is asking a lot to send someone an email with four long paragraphs of turgid text followed by “Thoughts?”. Even well-intended-but-open questions like “How can I help?” may not be that helpful. Email generosity requires simplifying, easy-to-answer questions. “Can I help best by a) calling b) visiting or c) staying right out of it?!”

5. Slash Surplus cc’s
cc’s are like mating bunnies. For every recipient you add, you are dramatically multiplying total response time. Not to be done lightly! When there are multiple recipients, please don’t default to ‘Reply All’. Maybe you only need to cc a couple of people on the original thread. Or none

6. Tighten the Thread
Some emails depend for their meaning on context. Which means it’s usually right to include the thread being responded to. But it’s rare that a thread should extend to more than 3 emails. Before sending, cut what’s not relevant. Or consider making a phone call instead.

7. Attack Attachments
Don’t use graphics files as logos or signatures that appear as attachments. Time is wasted trying to see if there’s something to open. Even worse is sending text as an attachment when it could have been included in the body of the email.

8. Give these Gifts: EOM NNTR
If your email message can be expressed in half a dozen words, just put it in the subject line, followed by EOM (= End of Message). This saves the recipient having to actually open the message. Ending a note with “No need to respond” or NNTR, is a wonderful act of generosity. Many acronyms confuse as much as help, but these two are golden and deserve wide adoption.

9. Cut Contentless Responses
You don’t need to reply to every email, especially not those that are themselves clear responses. An email saying “Thanks for your note. I’m in.” does not need you to reply “Great.” That just cost someone another 30 seconds.

10. Disconnect!
If we all agreed to spend less time doing email, we’d all get less email! Consider calendaring half-days at work where you can’t go online. Or a commitment to email-free weekends. Or an ‘auto-response’ that references this charter. And don’t forget to smell the roses.

down and nerdy: Embedded Audio

Now imagine that you have say 400 tabs open and you now have to search through all those tabs to find the offending audio. 

Some people might say, “OMFG, why would you have 400 tabs open?” Power users, enough said.

The point is don’t make Tumblr into the new Myspace let people browsing your Tumblog choose whether or not they want to hear your music.

down-and-nerdy:

Way back in the day, like when the internet was first invented, it used to be considered bad manners to embed automatically starting audio. Back in those days, we didn’t have app doohickeys or play buttons or pause buttons. That shit would start on its own and you were stuck listening to it or…

Thoughts of Corey Ward: Unwritten Rules to Not Being A Douchebag on Tumblr, Written

coreyward-thoughts:

It’s really fucking easy to not be a douche on Tumblr, but some people are so selfish and pigheaded they can’t figure it out. Nothing here is hard, out-of-the-ordinary, or needlessly restrictive:

1. When sharing something from Tumblr…reblog it to give appropriate credit.
2. When you post something…

cheap zen: Reblogs and sourcing

This issue really kills me.

Tumblr is rife with people who break the attribution chain, remove sources, even add robots.txt files and other tactics to keep other people from reblogging posts that they themselves reblogged from someone else.

Stop being an asshat, Tumblr folk.

cheapzen:

If you’re gonna reblog something that has a source, can you please not delete the fucking source?

Someone actually worked hard to make that. They deserve to be recognised for it, and they might want that recognition too. Imagine you’re in primary school and you’re so proud of this title page you…

The Axis of Awesome - 4 Chords (2011)

album: —