How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

PUT THE FLAMES OUT
Try not to send email when you’re freshly irritated or upset about something.
You’re probably in defensive mode, so the smarter part of your brain will be
taking a backseat. As a result, however carefully phrased you think your killer
email is, you won’t be using your most sophisticated mental resources as you
draft it. Pause and revisit when you’re calmer—perhaps after a night’s sleep.
If you find it cathartic to type out an angry note, using the 
affect labeling
technique from 
Chapter 17
, then type away—but first delete all the names from
your “To” field so that you can’t inadvertently broadcast your anger to the
world. Save it to the drafts folder when done, so you can revisit it and think,
“Thank goodness I didn’t send that.”
If the source of the irritation is an annoying email you received, don’t
immediately assume bad intent on the part of the sender. Remember that we tend
to make the 
fundamental attribution error,
assuming that negative behavior is
driven by negative motivations rather than circumstances. It means we often
assume that a curt email comes from a rude rather than rushed sender. And if
we’re reading in an irritable frame of mind, we can also suffer from 
inattentional
blindness
and completely miss more conciliatory nuances. How many times
have you gone back to reread an ostensibly outrageous email, only to realize that

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it wasn’t as bad as it first seemed?
Taken together, those two pieces of advice add up to a third: don’t handle
sensitive interactions over email if you can avoid it. Call the person or suggest
an in-person meeting, especially if you’ve already exchanged one or two slightly
strained messages. Our social brains are fairly good at reading others’ feelings,
but less so when we’re not face-to-face. Researchers found that when people
used sarcastic humor in an email, it was correctly understood as sarcasm only 56
percent of the time.
4
People were slightly better at recognizing sarcasm in
voicemail messages, but face-to-face was where people scored most highly on
tests of their emotional radar.