Force Your Boss to Make a Decision

I spent last week trying in vain to reach email consensus on a thorny issue, but after two days, most folks still hadn't even bothered to reply to my e-mail. I suspect that it just required too much mental energy to craft a response -- if the message simply contained buttons to agree or disagree, I could have wrapped thing up in time for High Tea.

Enter Zapproved, an online service that reduces your co-workers' choices. Create an account and then send e-mails with three minimalist buttons: Approve, Deny, and Comment Only. This makes it easy for stakeholders to agree or disagree and then get out of the way of your Progress Train. Include attachments up to a megabyte in size and 60 days of storage for old messages for free. The premium service ($12/month) bumps you up to 4MB attachments and 1GB of storage, forever. There's even a group plan that lets up to 20 people share a premium service account for $100/month.

Sure, you can sort of do the same thing with the voting buttons in Outlook, but Zapproved's stark, simple selections make it more likely for you to get a fast reply -- and the Web site tracks responses with an elegant poll result-style interface.

Of course, Zapproved is useful only if you need consensus on a go-no go decision, such as "cancel the job cuts" or "Renew Pushing Daisies for another season." If it takes discussion or there are multiple choices ("Would you rather have chicken of fish at the company dinner?"), then you'll need to fall back on traditional e-mail. Or perhaps Google Moderator.