When Acronyms CAN be useful…

I have never been a fan of acronyms. Until now…

ASAP for As Soon As Possible makes sense, not least for its brevity – it is short and to the point, but the over-use of acronyms can simply confuse and make real meaning difficult to see, and is a ploy regularly used by those numpties who prefer to converse in ManagementSpeak and GobbledyGook.

However, a friend from Amsterdam, Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, blogged yesterday at the Fleck Blog about something that really got my attention: the use of acronyms to add meaning to messages, specifically email messages. That was something new…

As Boris wrote:

“Email is killing me. I get 200/300 messages a day and I just can’t keep up. This is how I think my email looks:
60% spam
35% company communication
5% other

I already got rid of all the newsletters I signed up for (You have RSS for that now) and use a spam filter which takes care of 95% of all spam. And now we want to optimize the office communication…

First of all we decided to stop CCing each other on everything. If it is important, give me a call of tell me in person. Then we implemented OpenSubject.

OpenSubject is nothing more than a bunch of 3 letter codes that you can use in front of your subject line. An example:

‘NRN: information about office’
means:
‘this is information about the office which you might be interested in but you don’t have to tell me what you think of it or mail to me tell me you received this message’ NRN simply stands for No Reply Needed.

Here are the other 3 letter codes we use:
NRN: No Reply Needed
RYN: Reply with ‘Yes’ or ‘No’
AYQ: Answering Your question
ATC: Attachment is important
1QM: One Question Message
MQM: Multiple Question Message
FYA: For your Archive
FYI: For your information (NRN)
WFR: Waiting for your Reply/Advice/Permission
AET: Answer Expected Today/this Week/within a Month
RAF: Read and Forward (jokes, quotes, interesting)

Now when I look at my mailbox I immediatly see that I have a few RYN message which I know I can answer within 2 minutes or less because all that is needed is a simple YES or NO. And then I quickly read the NRN messages because I know I only have to read them and don’t have to answer anything!

This simple system makes interoffice communication a lot easier and my email manageable.

Feel free to try it too. It’s free…

Thank you for the insight Boris – well worth sharing! See OpenSubject