With the busy lives that we lead it can be so easy to fall into the trap of going hell for leather at work and simply not paying complete attention to what we are doing.

Here’s an example of what can happen when you don’t concentrate properly when replying to emails at work…

Minutes ago, I sent a quick note out to my database to advise when tickets would be on sale for an upcoming event.

One of the recipients hit ‘reply’ and wrote a note that was presumably intended for her friend but she forgot to overwrite my email address and sent it back to me.

While there was nothing offensive in the email (in fact it was mildly amusing), I’m guessing the comments were not actually meant to be viewed by me.

I wrote a polite email back indicating that I might not have been the intended recipient. She was mortified and sent a highly apologetic email back. I quickly put her out of her misery – I was actually grateful for the timely reminder to check and check again before hitting send.

I recently sent an email to the wrong person after autocorrect got involved in my email. I was lucky it went to a close friend and was not commercially sensitive. However, my bad for not doing a double check…

My key learning – no matter how busy the day, I’m adding a couple of extra seconds to double check the ‘to’ field of every email…

Have you ever accidentally sent a private or personal email to your boss? Or a client?

pay it forward shop grateful in april