All emails should be 2 lines only, is something I learned when I started working in an office. For example,
WHAT YOU ARE SAYING
WHAT YOU NEED FROM YOUR AUDIENCE (RESPONSE OR DECISION OR ACTION ETC)
My boss taught me this. Because people just don't read long emails. Simple as. Do YOU (want to or have time to) read someone else's long emails?
As time goes on, often I say (to myself) "forget that", and write all the detail that is needed anyway, even in email. But only for audiences that may care about the detail (or otherwise are safe to skip the email altogether).
But who uses email at work anymore, anyway, right? I guess some organizations.
Please reply by 3 pm today so we can confirm with the client.
in my experience when an action relies on somebody 'coming back' ESPECIALLY if it's a client. (do you want this, or that?)
It's best to tell them what you are going to do, unless they confirm otherwise.
e.g. We will proceed with removing feature Y to meet deadline of Mar 19, unless otherwise directed by 3pm today.
This avoids the limbo situtation where a team can't progress because they don't have clarity on X or Y.
Not always applicable but I find it works a lot of the time.
After sending emails to suppliers, they would often answer the first point in the text but ignore later points. This speaks to the send only 1 thing in an email, but if you have a few questions about something then put them in a numbered list.
I found response quality went way up when i did this, and often the responses were along the lines of :
1. do this
2. yes that's right
3. ok we note that
which i'm sure helps them becuaes the email is easier to read and parse in the first place and easier to write a reply to.
Certainly I have never been in such a situation, but just for me to understand: if the sender has enough decision power to move forward with a default action without confirmation, then the email is simply a polite notice to someone above in the command chain, isn’t it?
Why the email then? Wouldn’t a record of the decision (not via email , but in some confluence-like space) be enough? If the confirmation is really needed then a default action wouldn’t be possible, ofc
> if the sender has enough decision power to move forward with a default action without confirmation, then the email is simply a polite notice to someone above in the command chain, isn’t it?
In one team I did this all the time even though I didn't have the decision power. I did it to force people to respond.
Prior to my adopting this strategy, I'd send an email saying "We need a decision about this by X", and the most common response was ... sorry, there wasn't any! The majority of times people didn't respond, and I was stuck.
So I had to switch to "This is needed by X. I'm going to go ahead with Y, but let me know if you have other ideas."
And I would ensure that Y was a poor solution. I would get really rapid responses saying "Don't do Y! Do Z!"
Even though I've moved to other teams, I often use this technique (except if the team acts in good faith, my solution Y is actually my best attempt at solving it).
You've probably got a certain level of trust or delegated authority, but you want input and you're giving your leadership the opportunity to steer the decision if they feel they need to, and you're balancing that against the urgency of action.
By very direct analogy, I think there's a dictum in the US military to the effect that a bad plan executed quickly can be better than a perfect plan that's executed too late.
ETA: ... and you're potentially speeding the decision/action by giving leadership the opportunity to confirm/redirect on receipt of the email.
I’m going to McDonalds what do you want— a big mac meal sure no problem.
Get there.
Oh wait what did he want for a drink? Coke? Coffee? Water?
Send a text what you want to drink?
No answer — what do you do?
Instead text should be saying ‘getting u a coke unless you let me know’
No answer in time, so you just get a coke for your friend and if he doesn’t like it tough.
So in that sense i guess yes its a polite notice. But it points to failures in the process .
You should have known what he wanted to drink before going.
You have or now create a policy that states in cases of unknown drink or default is coke.
If your guys ‘don’t’ know whether they can drop feature X or ship late they have been failed by the level above that should state shipping is priority. Therefore dropping a feature is the only action that they can take.
But in take the other point that you do need some authority . Without it progress will stall, and this becomes management issue again. They didn’t ensure you had the info or resource to do the thing.
Edit to add after thinking about it a bit more, that when dealing with customers a slow customer can stall your whole op if you make waiting on a decision from them. Just tell then what you are doing and it lets you proceed. If they come back later with opposite decision then you just do that as well,typically.
Outputting files to a customer :
Do you want them named like this or like that?
No— tell them how you are naming them and if they dont like it theybwil let you know.
Its about removing decisions from customer as most of the time they dont even know what they want
Preach. I would love to see all email like this. I learnt this in my very first work place and will never get the trend of starting every email with "I hope you are doing well".
I live and work in France, and oh boy... It's just cultural. Every email is like a letter to the King. "Would you be so kind enough to consider my humble request that is described hereafter in next three paragraphs". Funny thing: I welcome AI summaries on those.
My other pet peeve: meeting invitations. Half of the meetings in my calendar are called "Point" in French (loosely translated as "Topic"), the other half has no descriptions but the headlines. I tried the "I am not going unless I know why I am invited" thing to no avail - you cannot win this against the entire org.
So, you guess from the list of invitees. Or ask the organizer at lunch. Then go with them to the meeting to discuss the Topic for 15 minutes. Which could have been easily discussed at lunch, but lunch time is reserved to discuss food, not work.
Oh well. I love our cuisine, though. And the culture, and people, everything really. Just not how we write email.
> I live and work in France, and oh boy... It's just cultural. Every email is like a letter to the King. "Would you be so kind enough to consider my humble request that is described hereafter in next three paragraphs".
Ha! When I was in grad school, we had a brilliant French student in our team. He did his MS, and decided halfway he hated the US (understandable at the time) and would return to Europe for the PhD.
When he started applying for positions, he would just keep cursing. When I asked what was wrong, he said he'd gotten used to the (more) direct American approach, and was finding it burdensome to write formal, sycophantic emails to people in France.
I’ve set my work calendar to auto rejects invitations without an agenda. If you can randomly steal 30 minutes of my time, you will be required to at least give me some minimal context as to why. The rejection note simply says, “please include an agenda”
This was such an improvement to mine as well. Lots of strange advice in this thread about "one sentence/question per email" and other arbitrary terseness. Just use a messaging system for single-thread async communication.
Writing the email is part of the thinking process for me so by the time I finish there is a single coherent sentence that I can cut-paste to the top with the rationale/evidence/etc organized below it. If the one-liner is enough they can skip the rest (which I needed to write anyway regardless) and if they need more detail they don't have to ask.
Some other practices I've picked up over the years:
Responses should always be inline between relevant quotes rather than the default of hiding the original at the bottom. Remove quotes that don't matter. My favourite responses are a simple "Agreed." after a long quoted paragraph of justification.
In general the email chain should get shorter with each reply otherwise it suggests that the topic is either too complex or insufficiently defined. It also gives some sense that it will eventually end!
Write subject lines that make searching/filtering easy to do later rather than something to catch the recipient's attention.
[Two to five lines of facts, with names, numbers, and dates.]
[Recommendation or next step.]
[Owner and deadline.]
Dollars to donuts the next generation of AI models will use this template as is, humans will forget to replace the placeholders and you’ll start getting a ton of emails with some of the placeholders verbatim.
Or people screw up the placeholder content and call you by the wrong name, wrong job title, wrong company, whatever (off by 1 errors in some columns in their automation sheet?).
It's already happening with outreach messages on LinkedIn. Gets an instant block.
I find that making the very last sentence a question makes it much more likely that I'll get a response than if the question is anywhere else in the email. The person needs to finish reading the email with the question, which prompts them to hit reply and answer it.
The immediate-response-rate goes down even more if the input being sought is not framed as a question ("I've been trying to figure out how to handle this situation" versus "Which do you think is the better route?").
Of course, some people will still respond regardless, but I've found that in both personal and business emails, keeping an email short and finishing with a question mark is the best way to ensure a rapid response.
For all the stress about making emails short and to the point, this subject example is entirely too long. No one is reading all this.
> Good: Action needed today: approve revised offer Decision needed: pricing for Client X Update: contract signed with Acme Risk: launch delayed by one week
Some of these are good, but a lot of it depends on company culture. It sounds like he's barking orders at people, which may be received poorly. Some of it borders on sounding like Kevin in The Office when he tried to eliminate words from his speech to save time.
I took technical writing my freshman year of college. The teacher said I was a natural. I then transferred to the business college and they beat that right out of me.
i learned the SCRAP mnemonic a long while ago: Situation; Complication; Resolution; Actions; Politeness.
works when the recipient is attuned to it. when the recipient is attuned to flowery/over-polite language i've found they can get upset/assume you're being rude/dismissive.
decent guidelines, esp for someone new to office work. my advice: nobody wants to read your email, so if you must send one keep it extremely short: between 0 to 3 sentences.
All emails should be 2 lines only, is something I learned when I started working in an office. For example,
My boss taught me this. Because people just don't read long emails. Simple as. Do YOU (want to or have time to) read someone else's long emails?As time goes on, often I say (to myself) "forget that", and write all the detail that is needed anyway, even in email. But only for audiences that may care about the detail (or otherwise are safe to skip the email altogether).
But who uses email at work anymore, anyway, right? I guess some organizations.
> Do YOU (want to or have time to) read someone else's long emails?
Always - as long as it makes proper use of paragraphs and doesn't have too many spelling/grammatical errors.
If I ever have to respond to an email asking clarification questions because they wanted to write a concise email, then my time is being wasted.
I prefer adding the detail; if it's going to turn into a phone call anyway I might as well have a script ready to go.
Most orgs still rely heavily on email, and most emails should be more than two lines to be useful. If it's only two lines, Slack it.
in his email he says :
Please reply by 3 pm today so we can confirm with the client.
in my experience when an action relies on somebody 'coming back' ESPECIALLY if it's a client. (do you want this, or that?)
It's best to tell them what you are going to do, unless they confirm otherwise.
e.g. We will proceed with removing feature Y to meet deadline of Mar 19, unless otherwise directed by 3pm today.
This avoids the limbo situtation where a team can't progress because they don't have clarity on X or Y.
Not always applicable but I find it works a lot of the time.
After sending emails to suppliers, they would often answer the first point in the text but ignore later points. This speaks to the send only 1 thing in an email, but if you have a few questions about something then put them in a numbered list.
I found response quality went way up when i did this, and often the responses were along the lines of :
1. do this 2. yes that's right 3. ok we note that
which i'm sure helps them becuaes the email is easier to read and parse in the first place and easier to write a reply to.
Certainly I have never been in such a situation, but just for me to understand: if the sender has enough decision power to move forward with a default action without confirmation, then the email is simply a polite notice to someone above in the command chain, isn’t it?
Why the email then? Wouldn’t a record of the decision (not via email , but in some confluence-like space) be enough? If the confirmation is really needed then a default action wouldn’t be possible, ofc
> if the sender has enough decision power to move forward with a default action without confirmation, then the email is simply a polite notice to someone above in the command chain, isn’t it?
In one team I did this all the time even though I didn't have the decision power. I did it to force people to respond.
Prior to my adopting this strategy, I'd send an email saying "We need a decision about this by X", and the most common response was ... sorry, there wasn't any! The majority of times people didn't respond, and I was stuck.
So I had to switch to "This is needed by X. I'm going to go ahead with Y, but let me know if you have other ideas."
And I would ensure that Y was a poor solution. I would get really rapid responses saying "Don't do Y! Do Z!"
Even though I've moved to other teams, I often use this technique (except if the team acts in good faith, my solution Y is actually my best attempt at solving it).
You've probably got a certain level of trust or delegated authority, but you want input and you're giving your leadership the opportunity to steer the decision if they feel they need to, and you're balancing that against the urgency of action.
By very direct analogy, I think there's a dictum in the US military to the effect that a bad plan executed quickly can be better than a perfect plan that's executed too late.
ETA: ... and you're potentially speeding the decision/action by giving leadership the opportunity to confirm/redirect on receipt of the email.
Heres an somewhat contrived example scenario.
I’m going to McDonalds what do you want— a big mac meal sure no problem.
Get there. Oh wait what did he want for a drink? Coke? Coffee? Water?
Send a text what you want to drink?
No answer — what do you do?
Instead text should be saying ‘getting u a coke unless you let me know’
No answer in time, so you just get a coke for your friend and if he doesn’t like it tough.
So in that sense i guess yes its a polite notice. But it points to failures in the process .
You should have known what he wanted to drink before going.
You have or now create a policy that states in cases of unknown drink or default is coke.
If your guys ‘don’t’ know whether they can drop feature X or ship late they have been failed by the level above that should state shipping is priority. Therefore dropping a feature is the only action that they can take.
But in take the other point that you do need some authority . Without it progress will stall, and this becomes management issue again. They didn’t ensure you had the info or resource to do the thing.
Edit to add after thinking about it a bit more, that when dealing with customers a slow customer can stall your whole op if you make waiting on a decision from them. Just tell then what you are doing and it lets you proceed. If they come back later with opposite decision then you just do that as well,typically.
Outputting files to a customer :
Do you want them named like this or like that?
No— tell them how you are naming them and if they dont like it theybwil let you know.
Its about removing decisions from customer as most of the time they dont even know what they want
Preach. I would love to see all email like this. I learnt this in my very first work place and will never get the trend of starting every email with "I hope you are doing well".
I live and work in France, and oh boy... It's just cultural. Every email is like a letter to the King. "Would you be so kind enough to consider my humble request that is described hereafter in next three paragraphs". Funny thing: I welcome AI summaries on those.
My other pet peeve: meeting invitations. Half of the meetings in my calendar are called "Point" in French (loosely translated as "Topic"), the other half has no descriptions but the headlines. I tried the "I am not going unless I know why I am invited" thing to no avail - you cannot win this against the entire org.
So, you guess from the list of invitees. Or ask the organizer at lunch. Then go with them to the meeting to discuss the Topic for 15 minutes. Which could have been easily discussed at lunch, but lunch time is reserved to discuss food, not work.
Oh well. I love our cuisine, though. And the culture, and people, everything really. Just not how we write email.
> I live and work in France, and oh boy... It's just cultural. Every email is like a letter to the King. "Would you be so kind enough to consider my humble request that is described hereafter in next three paragraphs".
Ha! When I was in grad school, we had a brilliant French student in our team. He did his MS, and decided halfway he hated the US (understandable at the time) and would return to Europe for the PhD.
When he started applying for positions, he would just keep cursing. When I asked what was wrong, he said he'd gotten used to the (more) direct American approach, and was finding it burdensome to write formal, sycophantic emails to people in France.
I’ve set my work calendar to auto rejects invitations without an agenda. If you can randomly steal 30 minutes of my time, you will be required to at least give me some minimal context as to why. The rejection note simply says, “please include an agenda”
I feel like incorporating the BLUF[0] strategy has helped my emails be more effective.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)
This was such an improvement to mine as well. Lots of strange advice in this thread about "one sentence/question per email" and other arbitrary terseness. Just use a messaging system for single-thread async communication.
Writing the email is part of the thinking process for me so by the time I finish there is a single coherent sentence that I can cut-paste to the top with the rationale/evidence/etc organized below it. If the one-liner is enough they can skip the rest (which I needed to write anyway regardless) and if they need more detail they don't have to ask.
Some other practices I've picked up over the years:
Responses should always be inline between relevant quotes rather than the default of hiding the original at the bottom. Remove quotes that don't matter. My favourite responses are a simple "Agreed." after a long quoted paragraph of justification.
In general the email chain should get shorter with each reply otherwise it suggests that the topic is either too complex or insufficiently defined. It also gives some sense that it will eventually end!
Write subject lines that make searching/filtering easy to do later rather than something to catch the recipient's attention.
Default structure
Subject: [Action, Decision, Update, Risk]: [topic]
[First sentence: the ask or punchline.]
[Two to five lines of facts, with names, numbers, and dates.]
[Recommendation or next step.]
[Owner and deadline.]
Dollars to donuts the next generation of AI models will use this template as is, humans will forget to replace the placeholders and you’ll start getting a ton of emails with some of the placeholders verbatim.
> humans will forget to replace the placeholders
I think you're right.
Or people screw up the placeholder content and call you by the wrong name, wrong job title, wrong company, whatever (off by 1 errors in some columns in their automation sheet?).
It's already happening with outreach messages on LinkedIn. Gets an instant block.
I find that making the very last sentence a question makes it much more likely that I'll get a response than if the question is anywhere else in the email. The person needs to finish reading the email with the question, which prompts them to hit reply and answer it.
The immediate-response-rate goes down even more if the input being sought is not framed as a question ("I've been trying to figure out how to handle this situation" versus "Which do you think is the better route?").
Of course, some people will still respond regardless, but I've found that in both personal and business emails, keeping an email short and finishing with a question mark is the best way to ensure a rapid response.
Also, strictly one question per email - otherwise only the first will be answered and any others ignored!
Yeah, if there are multiple items to address, I tend to use bulleted lists and then end the email with "What do you think?"
There should be some process that punishes those, who does that.
For all the stress about making emails short and to the point, this subject example is entirely too long. No one is reading all this.
> Good: Action needed today: approve revised offer Decision needed: pricing for Client X Update: contract signed with Acme Risk: launch delayed by one week
Some of these are good, but a lot of it depends on company culture. It sounds like he's barking orders at people, which may be received poorly. Some of it borders on sounding like Kevin in The Office when he tried to eliminate words from his speech to save time.
Best if the subject line is the conclusion and the message supports that.
Subject: feature X dropped from v4.4
Body: we all know this feature is delayed and will cause the release to slip. Marketing gave us the OK to defer it to 4.5
Dear Aunt Bee, Thank you for the sweater.
https://tinyurl.com/z9m89k2z
No reason to post shortened URL instead of this:
https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/4dmufm/how_tech_writ...
I took technical writing my freshman year of college. The teacher said I was a natural. I then transferred to the business college and they beat that right out of me.
As I was reading, I mostly thought "well, it might make sense sometimes; well, it's an opinion"
And then I reached:
> 10. AI is fine. Generic language is not.
> It is fine to use AI to draft or review an email.
> But edit it until it sounds specific and human.
Ok, maybe we shouldn't take advice from someone, who authoritatively states it is fine to put slop in the email?
> We write emails so the reader can understand the point in seconds, decide quickly, and forward the message without extra explanation.
I stopped reading right there. He's plain wrong about much (the majority?) of the world.
i learned the SCRAP mnemonic a long while ago: Situation; Complication; Resolution; Actions; Politeness.
works when the recipient is attuned to it. when the recipient is attuned to flowery/over-polite language i've found they can get upset/assume you're being rude/dismissive.
decent guidelines, esp for someone new to office work. my advice: nobody wants to read your email, so if you must send one keep it extremely short: between 0 to 3 sentences.