Knowledge workers like me (and you?) spend much of the day pushing emails around from one place to another.

So nothing is more annoying than people who thoughtlessly waste time and effort by composing their emails badly. Once a week perhaps, sometimes more, I find myself looking at an email with a death wish.

Scott Young has composed a list of seven bad email habits that make readers want to kill you.

He lists the obvious offenders — the hanging question, the buried request (with a fine example of how not to ask a question), and bulky paragraphs — as bad in snail mail as they are in email and which come from unthinking composition in any medium.

But then there are the email-specific sins. Think carefully enough about your email, he suggests, to work out if email is the right tool for the task:

E-mail works best for direct and non-time sensitive information. Conversations, discussions and anything that requires a heavy amount of back-and-forth should be done on the phone or in person. Trying to use e-mail to have these conversations can be slow, time-consuming and painful.

This extends to using email as emergency communication for urgent requests. If you need a response right away, the phone (or getting up and walking down the corridor) is the answer, not email. Don’t forget there are people who (unbelievably) only answer their emails once or twice a day.

And lastly he lists my most besetting sin, being an email smart arse:

Don’t try to be witty or sarcastic in an e-mail and pretend as if everything you say will be taken literally. Although a few metaphors can come across well in an e-mail, most don’t…. And don’t think using emoticons gives you the green-light to be clever and charming.

Sometimes, I find myself going so flat-chat to get to Inbox Zero that I dash stuff off without thinking, thus unwittingly making even more work for myself. It’s a kind of anti-productivity strategy.

There must be a better way. “Festina lente”, as Erasmus (Wikipedia ) might have said when opening his own inbox.