Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017)
1–10 of 53 posts
Re: Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017)
#2People are notorious for not reading or responding to email. Even business email, about topics vital to their job.
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?
Re: Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017)
#3This is a great case of actually putting in the steps to prove something many people implicitly or observationally assume is true. You only have a few seconds (at best) to grab someone's attention, so it stands to reason that a short email will be more focused and likely to grab their attention.
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!
Re: Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017)
#4I'm sure that part of it is that receiving a long email with lots of social niceties makes me feel like my reply needs to be an equivalently long considered email, which takes more time and mental effort to compose than a terse one line response, or a few bullet points.
Re: Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017)
#5Just a heads up: The ...
- 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.-
Re: Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017)
#6People are notorious for not reading or responding to email. Even business email, about topics vital to their job. 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 bet…
With regards to Slack or other asynchronous communication methods, its generally a mixed bag in my experience. Folks still tend to target some and not all of the points. Which then leads to more follow-ups.
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.
Re: Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017)
#7People are notorious for not reading or responding to email. Even business email, about topics vital to their job. 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 bet…
Indeed. The oft said "this meeting could have been an email" ...
... well. Sometimes, no.-
Re: Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017)
#8This is good advice for all types of email; especially work email.
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.
Re: Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017)
#9The converse lesson here is also important: If you don't want a response to your email, barrage the recipient with text.
Re: Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017)
#10People are notorious for not reading or responding to email. Even business email, about topics vital to their job. 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 bet…
With regards to Slack or other asynchronous communication methods, its generally a mixed bag in my experience. Folks still tend to target some and not all of the points. Which then leads to more follow-ups. 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 atte…
(It really really might come down to people not addressing all points due to carelessness, -and- it being easier to "compete" (corral?) attention, when in a meeting.-