From Email Hacks To Landing The Job Offer: This Week’s Top Leadership Stories

This week we picked up some tips for sending smarter, more effective emails, learned how to set more realistic expectations for our careers, and found out what makes hiring managers offer you the gig after the final-round interview.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of May 30:

1. 6 Ways The Most Productive People Send Emails

By one estimate, each of us receives an average of 112 emails every single day. Getting them read and acted on, according to productivity expert Chris Bailey, may start before you even hit the “draft new message” button. “So much of productivity is managing other people’s expectations.”

2. 8 Often-Overlooked Gmail Tricks

Gmail is still one of the most popular email services around, but there are a few helpful features that many of us don’t take full advantage of. Here’s a quick tutorial in the best of them.

3. Why You Keep Getting Close But Still Aren’t Landing Job Offers

You already know how to optimize your resume, write a knockout cover letter, and nail the first-round interview. But when the hiring process finally comes down to you and one other candidate, it’s them and not you that they go with. This week we learned what might be going wrong.

4. Why We Are Better At Making Decisions For Other People

New research is adding to our understanding of “decision fatigue,” the process that leads us to have trouble making good choices when we have more choices to make. The surprising finding? That decision fatigue goes away when we’re asked to make decisions on someone else’s behalf. Here’s why.

5. 3 Unrealistic Career Goals You Need To Abandon

It’s all well and good to set concrete goals and put them on a timetable, but there’s often little logic to the deadlines we pick. And that can hold us back. As one writer puts it, “Piling on the pressure to reach milestones without considering fluid definitions of success is limiting.”