If I’m talking with my friend Steve and we set a meeting for next week, I might send out the calendar invite to him with the title of “Meet with Steve“. On my calendar that makes sense, but now Steve has an event called “Meet with Steve” on his, where the title is completely useless.
Or, I might be putting together a proposal for Acme Construction. If I call it “Acme-Proposal.pdf” and they put it in a folder with the other proposals they’ve received, my title is 0% helpful to them among all of the other “Acme Proposals” that they’ve received.
For those sorts of things, I try to make sure to rename them. In the case of proposals, they usually live in our system with self-beneficial names like “Acme-Proposal.pdf“, but I always try to rename them to something more beneficial when sending, like “GreenMellen-Proposal.pdf” or even “GreenMellen-proposal-for-acme-project.jpg“.
Their perspective matters
It’s similar to the idea of remembering that your customers aren’t always where you think they are, and you need to view things through their eyes.
If I take just a moment and turn “Meet with Steve” into something like “Mickey <> Steve: Budget Discussion“, it’s much more helpful to both of us.
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