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Comment by jappgar | Hacker News Reader

I swear most executives can barely read so you're not doing your career any favors sending them more than 150 characters.

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The CEO of one firm I worked at wrote emails totally in bullet point format.

Made it much easier to read and you could just reply with:

> bullet point

response

which made life much easier

I love terse text communications most of the time (Slack and email at least). So much clearer. And easier to respond to.

I think we've all worked with someone who (I imagine subconsciously) feels the need to make things longer without actually adding more information in there, and it just makes everyone's day a little harder.

I developed this habit when I worked in software support. It made me substantially more effective. Sometimes people are reading for the joy of the prose. Sometimes they’re reading because they want to get to the answer. In the latter case, writing that is easily visually parsable is quite valuable.

In instances where context is important, I have been including a summary with call to action at the start of the message, then include details below to hopefully eliminate back and forth. It helps me be more clear with my point, and most people once they have an action only use the context for reference later.

It's called an executive summary because that's the only thing the executive will read of your carefully put together report.

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