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Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

If I don’t tell you when I’m doing the work, how will I know if you’ve said no or not? If I think one day is enough time, so proceed, but you take two days to respond, now I’ve done something against your instructions.

Adding a date avoids that:

“I’ll be migrating the build system on Wednesday (26th); please let me know if you have any concerns.”

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I'd tone it down a little via:

“I'm planning on migrating the build system on Wednesday (26th); please let me know if you have any concerns.”

The original wording makes it sound like it's already been settled, so nobody will bother responding. But by saying planning, you might get some feedback.

For what it’s worth, this seems like the fatal flaw in the OP to me. If you need input on whether something is good to do, it’s very easy for someone to reply “yes” or “sounds good,” so just ask for input. If you don’t need input, just send an FYI instead of the weird asymmetric asking-for-objections-but-not-approval.

As someone else pointed out, this is intention-based communication — in the style of Turn This Ship Around.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16158601-turn-the-ship-a...

We’re informing the manager of our intention, but we already decided it was a good idea at the engineering level. We’re not really soliciting input, eg, whether that’s a good idea or not. However, there might be conflicts we’re not aware of, eg, “Wednesday is bad, since there’s a demo that day.”

Asking if there are concerns is soliciting that information — but being clear about what you’re asking.

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