Do you know how to properly play the email game?

How about the text game? When do you respond to email? And when you respond to an email, what is it saying about you?

I’ve got a few rules about email that I want to share with you. Firstly, when I’m sitting around and a new email comes in and I’m answering other emails, I’ll always answer the new one as it comes in.

Why? Because I don’t want the email to get buried. Second, if I’m already in email mode, what’s the big deal? I might as well just answer it. And third, it just shows that I’m attentive and I want to keep conversation flowing.

The way I look at emails, it’s just a conversation between two people, whether it’s business, whether it’s personal or whatever it might be. And, if you’re already in conversation-mode answering other emails, you might as well answer the ones that come in because it’s like you’ve got somebody on the other end of the line.

I’m never behind on emails. I’m always on top of them. I rarely forget to answer an email because I’ve got another system also: every three days, I cruise through the last week of emails and check and see which ones I may have missed. That way, if I’ve missed one, I can answer it at the moment.

If it takes you longer than 72 hours to answer an email, it shows that you are rude and you don’t really want to correspond with that person.

It’s perception.

For those of you that are in the corporate world, I’ll share a trick with all of you that a good friend of mine uses: always answer emails late at night.

It only takes 20 minutes sometimes to answer all of these emails. But if you guys work the corporation and you answer emails late at night, the perception is that you’ve been working all night long, but in reality you went out to dinner with a friend, you had fun, you relaxed and now you’re ready to send emails.

Everybody in the office will think that you’re really on top of things all the time. And that’s what email is all about. Not only is it a good conversation method, but it’s a great way to change one’s perception of you. You can learn a lot about somebody by being aware of the time it them to send an email back to you.

For those of you that answer emails on your phone or on your Blackberry, that’s pretty smart also, as long as you’re not doing it in public places where you miss the opportunity to connect and meet real people.

I’ll answer emails on my Blackberry if I’m sitting around in a quiet place. My emails are really quick, to the point, and usually full of spelling errors also. But people enjoy reading my garbled English at times when it comes down to it. (I like to tell myself that.)

Text messaging can also be a lot of fun, and it also can be quite annoying.

When is the right time to let a text conversation die?  When is the right time to really keep the text conversation going?

When texting, I’ll keep the conversation going if it’s fun.  But if it starts interrupting what I’m doing, then I’ll tell the person, “Hey, I need to get back to work immediately.  I can’t play the text game anymore.  Let’s talk later.”

If the text conversation gets going real good, what I’ll do is I’ll stop the text conversation in mid sentence.  I’ll write, “Hey, pick up your phone for one second.” That way I can continue that conversation with them and actually speak with them.

Texting is a great check-in method.  It’s also fun to flirt by text.

For all the guys out there, I’ve got a whole program on texting that you really need to check out.

If you’re a woman, I’m actually spending my weekend coming up with a program for women about texting.

I find that most people really don’t know how to flirt via text; most people don’t really know how to create sexual tension via text; and most people are boring texters.

I’m always about answering a text when it comes in, because if you don’t answer it when it comes in, you’re probably going to forget about it. So every couple hours I’ll check my phone and I’ll see which texts came in and I’ll answer them.

If you have texts sitting for anything longer than five or six hours then you missed the whole conversation to begin with.

There are some people, though, that constantly text you all the time.  Now, you’ve got to learn how to train your friends to text you correctly.  If you’re not in the mood to text your co-workers all day long, just tell them, “Hey, I’m really in a zone all day long.  I don’t really want to hear about your lunch with your boyfriend or anything else personal during the day, because I really don’t have the time to answer it.”

It’s about being upfront.

Not only that, but be careful about what you write in the text, because a lot of it could be misinterpreted.  It could put somebody off, especially somebody who you’re thinking about dating and especially somebody who you might be thinking about doing some business with in the future.

If you really want to get your text game handled, let me show how it’s done.