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Another easy win to help reduce your own and your organisation’s carbon footprint is by using proper business email etiquette. This not only helps you convey the right message right first time and hence reduces the unnecessary rounds of email ping-pong. It also helps reduce the size of the actual email. Again the smaller the email and the fewer the emails the less resources needed to run your inbox, and thus the lower your carbon footprint. Here are five ways by using brilliant email etiquette you can contribute to this week’s Green office campaign.
Email etiquette to reduce your carbon foot print
For more tips on reducing email overload to reduce your carbon footprint see last’s years blog.
If sustainability is one of your key business values and objectives, why not talk to us about our Smart Email Management training workshops to support your sustainability programme. Meanwhile, why not click here to sign up for our free monthly e-briefing?
Tags: corporate email etiquette, email management training, green office week
It’s Green Office Week this week – 13 to 17 May. Reducing email overload can also reduce your carbon footprint. The larger the inbox the more resources you need to run it, hence the higher your carbon footprint. Here are my top five ways to contribute to Green office week by reducing email overload.
Reducing email overload for Green Office Week
Tomorrow the focus will be email etiquette to reduce your carbon foot print. For more tips on how reducing email overload also reduces your carbon footprint see last’s years blog.
Meanwhile, if sustainability is one of your key business values and objectives, why not talk to us about our Smart Email Management training workshops to support your sustainability programme.
Tags: email management training, email overload, green office week
Its Green Office Week this week and stopping email overload is one way to make a very significant contribution to reducing your carbon foot print.
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| Green Email Usage |
If your office and desk space was awash with papers you wouldn’t just go and ask for a new desk/larger office. You would be forced to clear up. Yet with email most people tend to ignore the warnings about mailbox sizes. Old emails are simply moved to another destination (for Outlook users often a pst file) and the inbox allowed to overflow again.
Unlike paper we can not see our emails, but make no mistake the more emails the more energy needed to process them. Even if you opt for email archiving to reduce the storage requirements, servers and energy is still needed to process them.
The main suppliers of email like Google, Microsoft and BT all promote large inboxes as an advantage. In my book this is amoral as it increases our carbon foot print and encourgaes email overload. It’s akin to the banks lending to people who could not aford to repay the loan. Instead of promoting bloated inboxes, responsible email providers should be promoting and rewarding those who downsize and maintain small sustainable inboxes.
Many business are now downsizing their office space to reduce overheads and be more sustainable. We should be doing the same with email to reduce our carbon foot prints. For example, reduce the volume of traffic through our inbox by reducing the number of emails chains, better email etiquette, sharing rather than sending the complete file.
During the week I will tweet more tips on how going green can also help you stop email overload.
Tags: BT, email chains, email etiquette, email overload, empty inbox, green office week, Microsoft
Reduce your email carbon foot print as part of Green Office Week. A free copy of ‘Brilliant Email’ to the best contribututor to help lower the email carbon foot print. Just becasue email is some how invisable it can be hard to realise just how much email overload raises our carbon foot print.
My thanks to everyone who has emailed with their activities thus far and which are shared here in additon to my daily tips on Twitter. Amongst the best ideas are those from Nicky Bassnett at a Manchester based University:
Several people have set their printers to save paper and toner by setting the default to one of the following.
Then there are the well tried and trusted practices of turning off all PCs, laptops, smart phones and monitors when you go home/stop working for the day. This might also help create some me time as you are less distracted by the ping of new messages (text and emails).
What are you doing? There is a free copy of Brilliant Email for the best activity. Tell me what you are doing either by email or leave a comment. You can also take my LinkedIn poll.
Tags: email carbon footprint, email overload, green office week
Are your emails resource hungry or sustainable?
Email misuse significantly increases an organisation’s and an individuals carbon foot print. Getting the email traffic down in order to save energy is one of my pet grips.
It never ceases to amaze me how few people spring clean their inboxes. Yet, the bigger the inbox the more natural resources needed to run the email servers. The reply is usually either why should I waste my time, or servers are cheap. Fine if you don’t care about the businesses profitability and the environment. It’s funny because if you kept so much paper that you ran out of office space you would soon have a clear out. So why not do the same with email?
Meanwhile of course most cloud-based email services such as Gmail and Hotmail actively encourage big inboxes.
Then there are the emails themselves – all those long signature blocks with icons and endless straplines. The one which makes me most cross is ‘please consider the environment and don’t print this email unless absolutely necessary’.
Short simple emails are best and that includes the signature block. There is nothing more annoying and unprofessional than an email where more space is taken up by all the marketing and PR blurb than by the message itself. What a waste. Furthermore, icons embedded in the email use up even more storage space.
Then there are all the unnecessary emails sent primarily either to cover your backside or shout about how clever you are. More wasted processing resources (eg energy) and server space.
What about fancy fonts and colour? Heaven forbid you need to print these. What a waste of toner unless you remember to use the black and white printer. However, all too often a coloured email lures you to the colour printer.
My daily email tips for this week were planned to focus on email best practice and sustainability as a result of recent and future client projects. By chance I heard about Green Office Week happening in May.
Prepare for Green Office Week by taking steps to make your emails more sustainable and use the minimum of resources. For tips follow my Tweet at Emaildoctor.
Tags: email best practice, email overload, green office week