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A type of email you can eas­i­ly avoid

No, some ​“reply all” emails we could have avoid­ed both send­ing and receiv­ing. For exam­ple, those that are replies to an email a col­league sent to many peo­ple at once to get answers from every­one. What do we want for lunch at the kick­off? Meat, fish, or vegan?

Such an email is fol­lowed by a long string of replies from the oth­er recip­i­ents where we learn what they prefer.

Let them fill it in

Is ​“one email to every­one who should respond” real­ly the best for­mat for ask­ing the ques­tion? I don’t think so. I under­stand that not every­one enjoys fill­ing in forms as much as I do, but it’s often smoother to use a sim­ple form. It won’t elim­i­nate all ​“reply all” emails, but some of them. Good enough!

Do this

1. The next time you need answers from many peo­ple and are about to email them all in a sin­gle mes­sage ask­ing them to reply, con­sid­er cre­at­ing a form instead.
2. Cre­ate a form in the form app that’s clos­est at hand, depend­ing on the plat­form you use. It’s faster than you think. Try Microsoft Forms if you work in Microsoft 365 or Google Forms if you’re in Google Work­space. If you want more free­dom to design the form to your lik­ing, use Type­form (which I often use) or the very pop­u­lar Can­va.
3. Send out the link to the form to those who should respond. It’s fine to do this in a sin­gle email, as long as you empha­size that they should click through to the form to respond rather than reply by email.
4. If you want to make han­dling respons­es eas­i­er for your­self, let the form response be the start of an auto­mat­ed flow in Pow­er Auto­mate or Zapi­er so that com­pil­ing respons­es, con­firm­ing with the respon­dent, and oth­er tasks are han­dled with­out you lift­ing a finger.
5. You won’t get around need­ing to mon­i­tor that you receive respons­es from every­one in the near term (unless you auto­mate that as well), so cre­ate a recur­ring to-do task that prompts you to check incom­ing respons­es once a week or as appropriate.

Less work for you if you want

If you col­lect respons­es from many peo­ple using forms instead of send­ing emails that invite ​“reply all,” you’ll be your col­leagues’ sav­ior in email over­load. The already stress­ful, fast-flow­ing stream of emails becomes slight­ly weak­er and eas­i­er to man­age. They will be grate­ful to you.

You also give your­self oppor­tu­ni­ties to auto­mate part of the work, which is hard­er when respons­es arrive in vary­ing free-text for­mats. Simplifying!

How do you do it?

Give me an exam­ple of when you used a form to col­lect respons­es in a sit­u­a­tion where it wasn’t the obvi­ous choice! I’m curi­ous to hear about your pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence, so feel free to write to me! 

(Do you use mul­ti­ple dig­i­tal tools? Many of the ones we use dai­ly can do more and more — but that can also make things feel a bit scat­tered. Check out my tips on how to decide what tool you will use for what pur­pose!)