Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017)

gkogan.co

46 pointsgk151 comments

People 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?

> If a reply is needed, they'll address either the first or last point raised. Never, ever all the points. Never completely.

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 :)

Really depends on who is responding. Emails that require a lot of effort to respond to are less likely to get a response in general, I've found.

Prying the answers you need out of your co workers and customers is a skill. I hate it but someone has to do it so it might as well be me.

Repeat the unanswered questions, add helper questions etc. I've discovered no way to avoid it.

As a writer I sort of hate it, but bullets--often in a slide format--tend to make more sense in a business setting. And, yes, shorter is generally better.

It's also valuable to clarify why the information is needed. I don't really have problems getting information from somebody when I email them and the email starts with "We are unable to proceed with <the thing they care about> until we have answers to these questions: <numbered list here>"

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

In my experience, the same is true regardless of medium. For that reason, I try to always form questions clearly (one question-marked sentence in the email, at the end if possible - no repeating the question in different words or dithering), and I give only one question. I write the rest down, but only deliver each after the previous has been answered.

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.

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.

It's sync vs async. Slack won't help if you let it spam you with notifications for every OH SO URGENT message.

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.

Agree heavily. Async mediums that interrupt like Slack with all the notifications stink.

Having good habits around notification and interruption management is important. As is making sure everyone understands and operates within the same mindset.

It’s not slacks fault. Everything interrupts by default until you switch on mute and nail the mute switch down.

Sane defaults would be great. The amount of interruptions on a day to day basis I would imagine is a significant drain on the collective attention span.

(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.-

Entirely possible! I would not be surprised if that is the case. That seems most likely when you boil down the context of the (likely) situation.

I don’t understand the distinction you are trying for here - email is also async.

Correct, email is also async. I was mainly providing my experience with respect to Slack or other async communication methods. I could have been clearer.

Generally long emails are hard to process. And most are multi-tasking when an email comes in. Even now I will often type a bunch of stuff and if the reply is longer than a paragraph, or needs multiple replies/input i will just ask for a 10 minute call.

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 or responding to email.

People are notorious for not reading, period.

RTFM, et al. exist for a reason.

"Hi, this is ChatGPT, and I noticed that in this reply you did not address all the points raised by the sender of the email."

Oh yes please, I honestly might make this a thing just for fun.

A cloudflare email agent that intercepts emails and scolds the sender if they don't give meaningful responses.

Indeed. The oft said "this meeting could have been an email" ...

... well. Sometimes, no.-

A counter is: this 4 day string of 23 emails could have been a 15 min meeting.

I can see that.-

A style I picked up from a relative, who is a lawyer, is to make bullet points with minimal other fluff:

  Addressee,
   - Do this
   - Then that
   - Be sure to be aware of this

I found it impersonal at first, but it's very effective in calling out the things that need attention

Numbers or letters are better than plain bullets so its obvious to the responder when they quote reply that they skipped from 1 to 4.

Bullets are so underrated as a tool. Perhaps because writing them clearly and concisely can be a lot of effort, but that's the point. You have to reduce the reader's cognitive load to get a response.

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.

Notice the asymmetries in work, you send an automated mail with zero load for you, and, interested or not, the user should have to read all your mail, and decide that there is even more work to do if he wants to reply. You have minimum effort in one side, maximum in the paying other. With a short mail at least the reading work is not so bad, but you still have the analysis one.

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.

(Author here)

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.

> 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.

That adds up man.

I know nothing about promotional email, but I'm curious if you ever provided links so that the user didn't have to type an answer in order to provide a bit of information - something along the lines of "I'm using this for a personal project" or "I'm considering this for my company".

I've tried that maybe once or twice in the past decade. It was a lot of work to set up. And while it made tallying up results easier (like a poll), it didn't nearly provide as much insight as open-ended answers did.

The converse lesson here is also important: If you don't want a response to your email, barrage the recipient with text.

If you don't want it to be read, barrage the recipient with text.

But then, if you don't want it to be read, why are you sending it?

Corporate life includes giving the appearance of working but being unproductive.

"If I send my email I'm fulfilling my responsibilities but if they don't answer I'm avoiding extra work."

Unethical pro life tip - use other people’s poor reading comprehension or laziness in reading thoroughly to get out of responsibilities.

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'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.

This 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!

This 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.

I find an explicitly identified "BLUF" section to be annoying. I can read. If you want to put the most important information or request up front, just do that.

To be clear, I’m not putting a section literally labeled “BLUF” at the top of every email. This is more about a mindset going into the writing process, and ensuring that I always take time to include the most important information in the first paragraph.

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.

I've never thought of it that way, but that's how I've come to write technical responses or evaluations. I know that I can be loquacious, especially when it comes to engineering analysis, so I've taken to write the part that makes everyone say "oh shit" at the top. Then I spend a few paragraphs detailing my methods and results, backing up my "we're screwed" statement.

(2017)

Think maybe people's email habits/use has changed a bit since? (for the worse, in this use case)

I kept doing this for the past 7 years and can confirm: it's still true.

I have sent lots of emails with simple, short paragraphs. I take the time to edit my drafts and remove anything superflous. Judging by the replies, 50% of users dont read the second paragraph. The remaining 50% dont read past the subject.

Personally I'd love if people just learn how to quote and how to NOT keep an entire thread in quotes because of some crappy MUA do so by default...

LLMs will soon be reading a user's emails, both incoming and outgoing, adding what they learn to the user's personal memory file.

_I would have written a shorter email, but I didn’t have the time._

Just 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.-

Thanks! I recently moved the blog to Ghost and some stuff didn't carry over. It's there now.

[Let's see if this works]

Yo!

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