Shortly after beginning my first real, professional-lady job out of college, it became apparent that email is the main mode of communication in an office—the language of the workplace, if you will. Face-to-face discussions were rare; most of your day was spent constantly refreshing your inbox for movement on projects, and conversely, getting up from your desk to use the bathroom … only to return to a 600-email explosion.
In this kind of environment, you can’t really help but think of the way people send emails as a kind of personality litmus test. There were those who structured their messages like a letter—very formal and polite. Others would sign their emails with only their first initial—or not at all! This, I thought, was very casual and cool. And then there were those whose entire email would exist in the subject line. For instance, the subject of the email would be “Is 2pm OK for tomorrow’s meeting?” and the body of the email would be left blank. They couldn’t even be bothered to click their mouse into another email field because they were so damn busy! I longed to be that important one day.
At 22, I was one of the youngest people in the office, and I was pretty timid—especially in the email arena. But as an assistant, I had a lot to get done, and I was forced to email a lot of people who I’d never met (and, in some cases, never meet) to get a lot of answers I didn’t have.
Maybe I was feeling insecure about my new job, or insecure about my youth, or just plain insecure, but I felt an incessant need to somehow rationalize all of my email correspondence, especially with more senior-level folk. I developed a bad habit: The overuse of the word “just.”
You see, “just” is a tiny, little, insignificant word that implies that whatever you’re emailing about is, well, tiny and insignificant. Innocuous. Harmless.
“Just” is a word that minimizes whatever follows. And somehow I got it in my head that adding that little “just” in there made whatever request I had smaller, easier to handle, and less of an inconvenience to whoever I was emailing. Basically, it’s another word for “sorry.” For example:
“Just checking in to see what times work for this meeting....”
“Just wondering if you have had a chance to review…”
“Just wanted to see if you had some time to chat about…”
“Just following up to see if you’ve read my last three emails…”
But here’s the thing: starting off an email with “just” demeans what you have to say. “Just” makes it sounds like whatever you’re emailing about needs to be apologized for. And it doesn’t. You don’t need to apologize for doing your job.
After months of “just”-ing my way through work, I realized how loaded this little word was at an after-hours gathering of the office’s assistants. The topic of various emailing styles came up, and one assistant who notoriously sent short, to-the-point, vaguely scary emails explained his method: He didn’t have time for pleasantries, but he wasn’t impolite. He was just doing his job. And guess what? He wasn’t a mean, scary person! On the contrary, he was hilarious and wonderful. But via email especially, he was taken seriously. It dawned on me that anyone could still be a friendly, awesome, warm person and maintain an heir of professionalism and authority in the office. And “just” made me seem meek.
Well, no more. I pledged to cut the word from all my email correspondence.
I won’t lie; it was hard at first. If I sent an email without a “just,” I was worried I sounded aggressive. “Just” was the comfort zone I clung to for fear of sounding too tough, too intense, too mean—basically everything women are conditioned not to be.
To be honest, nothing drastic happened when I finally worked up the courage to let go of "just." No one was offended; no one said I was curt. But wouldn’t you know it, soon I became one of the people getting emails asking for answers. I wasn’t the new kid on the block anymore, and people trusted me to get things done. I started taking on more responsibilities and working with more people in other departments. People responded to my emails more urgently because my emails sounded more urgent.
Over time, as I stopped saying “just,” I found that I didn’t need it anymore. I felt confident in my own abilities to do my job and determined to do whatever it took to do it well, including talking to people who intimidated me. Was it all because I ditched “just”? I say yes, because doing so forced me to trust in the importance of what I had to say, and I think other people started to, too.
So, I encourage you to remove “just” from your vocabulary. It’s just taking up valuable email space.
Source: http://www.glamour.com/story/why-i-quit-using-the-word-just-in-my-emails
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