Email is the juggernaut of modern office communications – dominating process to the point that its awesome power cannot be ignored. At least that's the zeitgeist. In reality, its dominance means that its power is assumed when, in fact, as a communications tool its power is exaggerated. Oddly, email is a device for the meek – allowing them to hide behind their computer screen rather than pick up the phone or meet face-to-face. And this can make us overly brave – turning the coward into a suicide bomber, which makes email more a hazard to navigate than a power to harness.

Certainly, email's ability to persuade is weaker than the phone or a meeting and sometimes weaker than a well-targeted piece of snail mail. Yet it's not going away anytime soon, so email has to be dealt with, although (note from the advice below) that the main concern of the experts is limiting the potential damage caused by email.

At best, email has quickened the pace of the business process – allowing formal communication to proceed at a hasty clip when it was formerly at what now looks like a leisurely stroll. Entire purchases, complex negotiations or formal documentations can be completed in hours (if not minutes) when they would have taken days (if not weeks). But this doesn't make the medium revolutionary: just quick.

At its worst, email destroys communication, erodes relation­­ships and kills nuance. It can also waste as much time as it saves. Uncontrolled email can take over – making it the enemy of productivity (a far cry from its intended role as an aid to communication).

A fantastic tool if …

Julie Morgenstern has written a series of books aimed at both personal and workplace organization. With names like Organizing From The Inside Out (2000) and Never Check Email in The Morning (2005), her key aim has been to focus our attention on controlling workplace displacement behaviour, with an obvious and primary target being email.

She's asking us to realize that – when it comes to workplace inefficiency – the problem is usually us, not those harassing us (most often via email). Morgenstern considers modern innovations such as the Internet and email fantastic tools if properly managed. Not properly managed, and they become tyrannical beasts able to eat time and terrorize our process.

We must tame the beast, which brings us to her central email suggestion: to create a ‘cone of electronic silence’ by resisting looking at email for the first 60 minutes of our working day. To look is to risk our entire day being hijacked by reactivity when our aim should be to pursue proactivity (i.e. setting and pursuing our own agenda).

And, if this sounds unrealistic, think of its other key benefit for workplace efficiency: avoiding the regretted reply. This is one of my worst traits – firing off an emotionally charged email, usually in response to someone else's emotionally charged email, and then almost instantly wishing I hadn't. The day is as good as lost, as I fret, backpedal, fret some more, backpedal some more, seek reassurance from everyone around me, and ultimately give ground. All of which could have been avoided if I'd just controlled my email reaction time.

In fact, this is easily done by creating one morning pomodoro session to read emails and another – later – session for replying (perhaps leaving any particularly tricky ones overnight).

Even Mackenzie has something to say on this one – extending it to the ‘chilly tone’ of many emails.

‘Ah, but we're so hooked on the easy technology,’ he writes in a later edition of The Time Trap, ‘we use it for everything. Only later, do we realize that we ought to have picked up the phone or visited the person we wanted to influence … The time we hoped to save by using email must now be spent repairing damaged feelings and rebuilding trust.’

Avoiding email landmines

Certainly, email is more open to misinterpretation than any other medium (except texting – see below). There's something about the immediacy, the everyday language and the fact that written ‘tone’ is difficult to discern that means many emails are read in a different ‘voice’ from the one intended, causing unnecessary offence.

Yet avoiding such landmines is not difficult:

• State your tone from the outset. ‘This is not an angry email’, ‘I write as a friend’, ‘please read this in the friendly tone in which it is written’ – that sort of thing (although such notes can equally raise our guard, confirming that email really is a poor medium for anything emotional).
• Say hi. Always use the ‘Hi [Jim/John/Jane],’ greeting – it's simply become the norm for friendly emails.
• Mind your language. Avoid words such as ‘wrong’, ‘mistake’ and even ‘you’ in any negative context. ‘I think/feel’ is much better than ‘you are’ (because you're stating your feelings rather than projecting deniable accusations onto others). Words such as ‘may’ and ‘could’ also help remove the hardness or starkness of any instruction or reprimand. And any form of accusatory or hierarchical language should be avoided. For example, writing ‘you were wrong to do this,’ will immediately generate a defensive response. If, instead, we write ‘I feel something went wrong on this project: let's discuss,’ we're stating our feelings (which they cannot deny) while avoiding being accusatory. And, rather than throwing hand grenades from behind a wall, we're inviting them to offer their view first,
• Don't be an informal emailer. To anyone other than close friends, you should send only professionally constructed and well-written emails. While this may seem counter-intuitive, it's the inconsistency in tone – the loss of informality as you address a serious subject – that most often unintentionally offends. I always ask employees to adopt the tone of a country solicitor, who may be friendly but is never overly familiar or lax in his/her choice of words,
• If genuinely annoyed, avoid email. It's a horrible medium for soothing differences, with users quickly entrenched and hurling abuse. Certainly, I've solved flaming email rows with colleagues after a few minute's face-to-face. It's a lesson worth learning – email (perhaps due to the anonymity of the keyboard and the ease of clicking ‘send’) puts us at our least conciliatory.

Tackling the randomness of email

Having caught up with the technology, Mackenzie offers plenty of thoughts on what he calls the ‘randomness of electronic interruptions’. These include (with added thoughts of my own):

• Control inbox activity. As with Morgenstern, Mackenzie is keen to put email in its place – even suggesting turning off the incoming signal (or not opening your email account) until an allotted time, just to remove the temptation. Of course, smartphones make this more difficult but, in each case, we must remember that these are our tools. We control them, so discipline yourself to deal with email twice or at most four times a day, he states – at the allotted moments.
• Be ‘on deadline’. If necessary, prepare an auto-return message stating your incapacity for email correspondence due to being ‘on deadline’ with a major project. This may seem a little pompous, but it's effective in letting people know why you may be maintaining email silence. Certainly, I've seen this from editors of periodicals as they approach deadline, so it's surely extendable to other professions – especially since the irritation threshold from people expecting a reply to their email can now be measured in minutes.
• Avoid long threads. These can often be conversations, perhaps started by a senior, where no one is now willing to absent themselves. But, in most cases, they're threads to nowhere. Eventually the person not replying gains more kudos than those in the debate, so don't add fuel to the fire with further long emails: it's not cool, it's not efficient, it looks insecure and – in reality – it's no more than a timewaster's charter.
• Delete threads. One thread-reduction trick is to try to delete all the emails below the one you're answering – and don't be afraid to update the subject line to make it relevant. Again, some may see this as a control mechanism. Fine – it is!
• Subject lines. While on the subject of subject lines, always use one and make it as generic as possible (cryptic subject lines are as useless as white space). And always add one when replying to an email without one. Also, try to educate regular emailers to include a subject line. Some people seem oddly reluctant, perhaps worrying they'll be filtered by subject when in fact the opposite is true: after date and name the most common way of searching emails is via the subject line, so without one your email is more likely to be lost.
• CC's. When initiating an email, restrict the number of CC's. Sure, this may ruffle a few feathers, but in the right direction – making you the arbiter of exclusivity (although avoid doing this as a deliberate ploy as it will almost certainly backfire). I've always been tempted to CC in uncle Tom Cobley and all – usually when fishing for praise from seniors or trying to prevent someone else taking the credit for a positive. Yet it's my insecurities that turn me into an avid CC-er, and it's a trait I now actively suppress – not least because it gets me into trouble. Many organizations are highly politicized places and over-CC'ing can lead to fights about why you ‘included X’ in the email. Unbeknown to you, X and Y are currently feuding, and you've just added to the aggravation and lost two allies.
• Keep emails short. Even on important subjects, email length should be kept to a minimum. Longer statements – given as proposals or meeting notes – should be an attachment written in a word-processing document, and only when requested or as an agreed outcome of earlier discussions. Don't generate documents for the sake of it as they'll just irritate. Again, smartphones have had an impact here – forcing sometimes lengthy statements onto the email because attachments are hard to open and even harder to read. Fine, but create a headline within the email – something like ‘Meeting Note Below: for smartphone ease’.
• Indiscretions. Avoid indiscreet comments – always. Even if replying to a privately sent indiscretion, play it straight. If there's an indiscretion in a thread, be the one that deletes the lower emails to prevent it ‘going viral’ (even if you agree with the sentiment), although resist chastising others for indiscretions or you'll simply be cut out of future correspondence.
  With respect to your own indiscretions, it's worth remembering that these are most tempting when reacting to an email that's somehow triggered you emotionally. No matter what's triggered you, however – no matter how deserved the target – you'll be handing the recipient dynamite they could throw in your face at a future date. Just think: you may be forced to stay on good terms with that person for the rest of your career in order to avoid them using that indiscretion against you. Unlikely as that now seems, why take the risk?
• Emotional emails. And there's an absolute golden rule with any email that's had any sort of emotional impact: DO NOT REPLY FOR AT LEAST AN HOUR and – if possible – longer. By allowing time to pass, the emotions will have dissipated and you'll have started thinking strategically. Remember, your judgement should be focused on your long-term goals, not on reacting to your triggered emotions.
• Junk email. This is an easy one, so I'm never certain why people get so exercised about it. If unsubscribing to individual junk mail senders fails (as it often does), simply set up a ‘junk mail’ folder, assign junk to it as it comes in – with the instruction that this sender is ‘always junk’ – and repeat the process until the problem goes away. I've been doing this diligently for a year and I've managed to get my inbox down from 250 emails a day to … let me see now … 240!
  OK, it is annoying – especially when eagerly awaited emails find their way into your now avaricious junk folder.
  If it really bugs you, set up several email accounts and keep one exclusively for key contacts (i.e. don't hand it out to people unless you're certain you want them to email you). An alternative email address restricted to important emails may also help regulate the number of times you look in your inbox, as lowering the expectation of email traffic will reduce ADD-style flitting between your email account and other computer programs.
• Avoid instant messaging and text. Such devices compress our communication further – even abbreviating language into a sometimes indecipherable shorthand. While both are developing a more business use – having been championed by teenagers – they should never be used in anger (where they can even make email seem conciliatory).
• Break office silence. Finally, there's the need for offices to have a buzz, which email kills – with even adjacent colleagues resorting to email conversations in order not to break the silence. I hate it. If writing an email to someone within easy talking distance, stop writing and speak to them instead. That's unless they're on a major project and are keen not to be interrupted which, of course, they should have communicated. In our office, we use listening to music through headphones as our signal we're concentrating and would rather not be disturbed. If not wearing headphones, we're fair game for a spoken, rather than written, interruption.