If a reply is needed, they'll address either the first or last point raised. Never, ever all the points. Never completely.
No wonder people tend to call so many meetings. They can corner colleagues, get a complete, coherent response to complex issues.
I wonder if Slack is any better? Do folks respond better to one question at a time?
Use numbered short topics instead of a wall of text, even if they're all in the same email. It usually gets me a lot more answers than something more prose like.
> I wonder if Slack is any better? Do folks respond better to one question at a time?
Post numbered short topics :)
Repeat the unanswered questions, add helper questions etc. I've discovered no way to avoid it.
As someone who both sends and receives a lot of business email and who is very busy, frankly if your email isn't structured like this, or it's written as a long rambling essay or something, 99% of the time you shouldn't send it
If I ask you more than one question at a time, or give you the freedom to respond outside the framework of a question-answer pair, it means I respect your ability to communicate.
I wonder if this has to do with other interruptions on Slack (or other mediums) occurring at the same time. Pretty common to be responding to something only to be interrupted by something else that pulls your attention away.
Make a habit to ignore it and batch answer now and then, between tasks not during tasks. Then teach everyone else in the org to do the same if they don't get the hint.
Having good habits around notification and interruption management is important. As is making sure everyone understands and operates within the same mindset.
And even today when this was done, We addressed the context of the email and I helped with 3 other things that werent on topic in 10 minutes. So it was a better use of time (and I do acknowledge plenty of meetings are totally useless, even ones I have called...)
People are notorious for not reading, period.
RTFM, et al. exist for a reason.
A cloudflare email agent that intercepts emails and scolds the sender if they don't give meaningful responses.
... well. Sometimes, no.-
Addressee,
- Do this
- Then that
- Be sure to be aware of this
The format you described is what I use for emails and messages.
Bullet trees are what I use for everything else. I can spend like an hour on a good bullet tree, but I am rarely misunderstood or ignored.
But giving out information that should matter to your particular client, like personalized info on how things are for his user (like how his account is using the service provided, and some hints on how to improve on that with new offerings) may deserve some more thought, even if that report/mail was generated by an script. Give more effort to your side. Even if is longer or require more work for the end user.
What I've learned, after hundreds of convos with developers sparked by emails like this, is that many people are happy that someone from the company is interested in their project and their opinions.
Those who feel that way are glad to get this and they're glad that there's no burden on them to get on a call or schedule a zoom or fill out a questionnaire or even click out of their email client.
And those who don't want to be bothered, well at most they've lost 5 seconds of their day to read the email start to finish.
In other words I think this fairly symmetric... Low effort and high value on both sides.
That adds up man.
But then, if you don't want it to be read, why are you sending it?
"If I send my email I'm fulfilling my responsibilities but if they don't answer I'm avoiding extra work."
Why isn’t it done yet? Because we’ve been waiting on X to address Y and after three weeks of reminders there’s been to reply or action. It’s X’s fault, not mine, I communicated.
I'd be curious to see how this works in an internal corporate setting. I tend to notice that 1+ page email blasts about some technical or process change at my employer (who I do not speak for) tends to get ignored. If you ask people if they know about the process change, they generally have no idea what I'm talking about. A quick email that says "Hey we've migrated the schmission engine from forkilate to quantilate, please stop using forkilate by August 7th" tends to get a lot of attention!
When an email really does need lots of detail, I’ve made a habit of always including a BLUF, or “bottom line up front” - kind of like a TL;DR but more focused on identifying the key things I want the reader to know if that’s the only paragraph they read.
I also try to structure and label my emails to make it obvious which parts are “please read all of this” and “the rest is here in case you’re curious”.
The trouble is that saying less often takes far more time, and people don’t bother trimming things as a result. But this “saved” time almost always gets spent later anyway when that email that no one read now requires a meeting since the transfer of information wasn’t successful.
I do use section headings later in long emails to help visually break up the content and help the reader skim/find what they’re looking for.
It would be annoying to begin every email with something labeled BLUF. Although I personally wouldn’t care if it would help more people actually put the bottom line up front.
Think maybe people's email habits/use has changed a bit since? (for the worse, in this use case)
- https://www.gkogan.co/question-for-saas-trial-users/
... URL linked to from "Take your welcome or onboarding email — [start here] if you don’t have one" is 404ing for me.-
Hi