This morning I got an e-mail that was forwarded from my mom. The message was announcing dates for a family reunion on her side of the family. There was no other information provided, only the dates and that information about hotels would be provided at a later date. The first question I asked myself was, "Where is the family reunion?"
I fired off an e-mail back to my mom asking for the location and she reminded me that it would be in Santa Cruz, California. E-mail is great in that it is almost instant and very close to free (as in no cost to use). The problem is that it also makes us lazy. When you had to send invitations to family reunions using the postal service, you made sure that you answered all of the "W" questions: Who, What, Why, Where, When. With e-mail, you can quickly fire off an invitation and if you forget something, send out a correction. Text messages are worse, but that is a subject for another day.
Taking the time to reread an e-mail and making sure it has all of the important information will help your recipients greatly. If the original sender of the e-mail had simply gone through the "W" questions before sending the message, I would not have had to take extra time to get clarification. After all, my wife's family is also planning a family reunion and I am having a difficult time coming up with ways of avoiding the both of them.
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