I started to follow this approach [1] 6 month ago and it is amazing how much clearer my own thoughts in communication have become.<p>1. Subjects with keywords. The subject clearly states the purpose of the email, and specifically, what you want them to do with your note.
Keywords: ACTION, SIGN, INFO, DECISION, REQUEST, COORD<p>2. Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF). Lead your emails with a short, staccato statement that declares the purpose of the email and action required. The BLUF should quickly answer the five W’s: who, what, where, when, and why. An effective BLUF distills the most important information for the reader.<p>3. Be economical. Short emails are more effective than long ones, so try to fit all content in one pane, so the recipient doesn’t have to scroll. use active voice, so it’s clear who is doing the action. If an email requires more explanation, you should list background information after the BLUF as bullet points so that recipients can quickly grasp your message. Link to attachments rather than attaching files. This will likely provide the most recent version of a file. Also, the site will verify that the recipient has the right security credentials to see the file, and you don’t inadvertently send a file to someone who isn’t permitted to view it.<p>===<p>[1] <a href="https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-precision" rel="nofollow">https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-pre...</a>
Rules for good emails<p>1. Keep the message as short as necessary but no shorter.<p>2. Put the most important information at the top of the message.<p>3. If it email is for an ask, call out from who you need the response and put it at the top of the message.<p>4. If you need to send a long email with many details, put the most important information at the top (ie. what the reader <i>needs</i> to know) and then fill in the body with details he/she can choose to indulge.<p>Example<p>Hey Jane, I need your input on how to prioritize my current work. Can you provide guidance on where I should focus?<p>Bug XYZ was assigned to me and it's taking longer to complete because we have a dependency on Vendor ABC completing a change to their web service. This is impacting the commitment to my team on Feature 123 because we are near the end of our sprint.<p>Lemme know.
As a manager or senior <anything> a huge part of your job is communication and distributing information, and email is one of, if not, THE core method of doing this.<p>The author has decided to provide poor communication because she can’t handle her inbox. One word replies can be extremely misleading and will cost her more time overall than reading and replying to her emails properly. I would be fuming if I was her boss or worked for her.
This doesn't work. I've gotten many bad reviews, because people thought I was being "curt" or "mean" because I was replying to their question with short replies.<p>None, of my emails were intended to be mean, I just didn't see the point in fluffing up my emails, and only responded with the required information, but I guess people require the fluff or they get their feelings hurt.
My experience has been that a lot of people are surprisingly uncomfortable writing. This includes people who have gone to the best universities --- people with excellent educations. They can write well enough to get through school, but they don't enjoy it, and they don't feel they are really expressing themselves in writing.<p>Personally, I feel like my writing skills are better than my verbal skills, so I default to email, because email plays to my strengths. But over the years I've been taught that I'm in the minority on this. Many managers and co-workers greatly prefer to have a conversation. Often, they feel like they are not getting the facts when they engage in written communications. Apparently they need to see my face and read my body language. Apparently this is true even when the subject is deeply technical, like talking about the APIs our microservices use to talk to each other.
I think the author suffers from a perfectionism problem. She wants to sent the perfect reply. When asked for advice, she sets a bar that’s much higher in her own head for what the reply should be than what the person asking likely intended. Bosses and CEOs don’t seem to suffer from these anxieties, and have no problem sending back short, decisive, and sometimes imperfect replies.
I have always disliked the massive over-use of e-mail, and when I first heard "Email is where keystrokes go to die" [0] it really resonated with me. E-mail is temporal, but far too often used for things of long lasting significance. Though it's somewhat of a necessary evil for communicating externally, I don't use it internally for anything more than I have to.<p>Here's my take:<p>Anything long-lived belongs on wiki, ticket system or other shared storage location. E-mail a notification to say there's an update, but the official version doesn't belong archived forever in everyone's inboxes -- well, everyone other than employees who happened to start after it was sent, of course.<p>Quick questions are better done over chat, if for no other reason than the single-line interface tends to encourage single-line questions.<p>Long conversations are better had in person or by video chat. How many times have you been on an e-mail thread that included several angry paragraphs written back and forth because of an incorrect assumption or simple misunderstanding?<p>My ideal interactions start with a chat message or ticket, switch to in-person/video if needed, and document the result (if relevant) in a ticket or wiki page. No e-mail involved.<p>[0] <a href="https://jamesclear.com/keystrokes" rel="nofollow">https://jamesclear.com/keystrokes</a>
I think author is missing the point of "emailing like a CEO." It's not about being terse, it's about clarity. Yes, emails with clarity are often short, but not all short emails are clear. I wrote about this just yesterday: <a href="https://www.gkogan.co/blog/clarity/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gkogan.co/blog/clarity/</a>
When I see the phrase "emailing like a CEO" I imagine mainly <i>not asking for opinions or decisions</i> rather making <i>statements of fact</i> or <i>decisions</i>. For example, I got into the habit of not asking for vacation, rather I say "I am taking time off from day X to day Y", or declaring my design decisions instead of asking for opinions.<p>In the case of asking for time off, my rationale is to avoid making someone spend time evaluating if my request is acceptable.
Well CEO can do it because she is a CEO. If any employee would use this method it'd be considered poor communication and the person considered as lazy and incompetent.
What I have realized is some people are just naturally good at this. They are able to get to the nub of the issue, anticipate a pointless back and forth and get things done.<p>It's not simply an issue of length, its communication and I guess maturity, experience and savvy.<p>Of course if you already have authority then it's no longer a communication thing but a power thing, as things will anyway get done and some are inevitably waiting for opportunities to suck up to you. So no point aping a CEOs style if you are not a CEO.
> I wanted to know, did you always email this way, or did you only start once you became the boss? His answer (over email): “Yes.” I’m going to assume the yes was to the first part of the question and he skimmed over part two.<p>This isn't something to emulate. People who only read the first few words of an email before replying make communication harder for everyone else. Sometimes things can't be accurately summed up in half a sentence.
We had external trainer here some weeks ago and at one point he mentioned(boasted) that he had inbox of 4000+ unread emails. On the last session he wrote his email on the board and said that we can just contact him for further questions and of course no one wrote it down.
I would say, do your best to imagine the receiver’s Inbox and help them.<p>I wish that E-mail clients didn’t give so much control to senders. (Oh, you picked a crappy Subject line so now I need to use that in my list forever? Oh, you rambled for the first 1-2 sentences so now my message preview is useless. Oh, you mark every E-mail “high priority” so now that sort column doesn’t really organize things usefully.)
Jeff Bezos is famous for forwarding emails with just a question mark to employees when he receives complaints from customers.<p><a href="https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-to-receive-a-question-mark-e-mail-from-Jeff-Bezos-at-Amazon-Inc" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-to-receive-a-question-ma...</a>
Perhaps the problem is attempting to review emails at a time when you can't formulate proper responses, i.e. on the phone. If it comes by email, it's probably not urgent enough to justify looking at them at a time when you can't respond.<p>On the flip side, they probably deserve more than a casual glance and a two word response.
I once heard a CEO's job is to make decisions and communicate them. This article seems to reinforce that. I'm not a CEO, but I try to be as concise as possible when I communicate by email. Two things I do are not mentioned in the article. I always address the recipient by name if possible. And, I always add my signature, which on my computer includes my address and phone number. Addressing the recipient by name gets their attention better. And, having my contact info in every email makes it easy if they want to communicate with me via another medium. Also, I always say Please and Thank you. In terms of email management, I use the Getting Things Done method, which works well for me.
Some people get anxiety when email piles up in their mailbox and may spend a considerable amount of time sorting and categorizing their emails, some go as far as making zero inbox a thing.<p>I would hazard to say most people don't care about their inbox. I for one don't mind at all if an email I didn't read festers in my inbox for years, after all if it's not urgent enough to call or physically reach out to me about it it's not that big a deal.
"Let’s call this “boss email.” It’s defined by nearly immediate — but short and terse — replies. The classic two-word email. For underlings, it can be inscrutable. Is that an angry “thanks” or a grateful “thanks”? Does “please update me” imply impatience with you? Boss email can be the workplace equivalent of getting a “k” text reply from a Tinder date.
One of the features of this is that it would feel wholly inappropriate for an underling to reply to their boss using the same fast terseness. So is the boss email also a power move, a way of asserting dominance? I doubt many bosses sit staring at their employees’ emails trying to figure out what “ok” really meant.”"<p>Wow that's some deep social commentary - similar to Gogol's "overcoat"
Yes and No on this. One of Bezos' big things is "don't manage by proxy". This feels like a communication proxy. Be natural. If you write novels, learn how to be more direct. I have had a lot of terrible bosses who try to act/write/behave like CEOs.
Probably should be a disclaimer to articles like this.<p>Doing X like Person Y makes life Z really only works well when you are basically very similar to person Y.<p>Emailing like a CEO works best when you are a CEO, and are above office politics.<p>Probably shouldn't email like a CEO if you aren't one.
Since moving to Slack, my email has been reduced drastically (both in length and also in quantity), and also writing long emails were limited for sake of archiving or recording as part of formality. Slack, or similar platform, allows workers to write shorter messages, as well. However, one downside is that Slack is more chatter-prone, so the message has been shortened, but now there's a lot more chatter/messages going around.
Good read. I cut about 10k emails from my longstanding primary email address. This got me down around 90k emails. I am still trying to unsubscribe from stuff, keep up with deletions, yadda. It seems completely hopeless.<p>I find myself moving to a different email address. Deleting around 9.5k emails there got me down below 500 emails. It is making it increasingly difficult to bother to log back into my old address.<p>So this article is kind of timely for me.
The way to deal with this email style (in my experience) is to read absolutely nothing into any aspect of the communication and respond succinctly to exactly what they said. But that would probably only work if your boss is writing that way because he's actually trying to manage many things and communicate efficiently. If he's doing it as a way to look cool or whatever, he might just get mad at you.
Here's the next rule for you:<p>DO NOT TOP POST<p>Seriously, posting inline is easier to write and read and makes your email more clear. You don't have to wrangle your words to make it clear what part of their email you're replying to. If you don't need to refer to anything they said, delete the whole email and just put in a couple of words alone.<p>Stop top posting!
<i>I emailed Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and star of TV’s Shark Tank, because he is known for responding right away to anyone who emails him, and because now I can give this story the headline</i><p>Really? What's his email? I think I direct-emailed him before at blogmaverick and didn't get a response.
I would like to add this bit to anyone attempting this:<p>If you are the CEO you can ask your IT team to check on emails and they jump on it pretty quick. If you don't have that ability then remember the following.<p>Subjects of emails trigger anti-spam. So be choice, sparse, and unique if possible with email subjects.<p>carry on.
I don't wanna email like a CEO.<p>I want Inbox Zero for Life: <a href="https://xph.us/2013/01/22/inbox-zero-for-life.html" rel="nofollow">https://xph.us/2013/01/22/inbox-zero-for-life.html</a>
The issue with standardizing on two word replies is that people will eventually stop writing you in the first place. This can <i>feel</i> good, but it's usually a bad sign, whether you're an IC or a manager.
I am thinking seriously about Yishan-style CEOs at this point. I wonder how many professional (as opposed to founder) Yishan-style CEOs even exist at this point. Yishan is not a founder-CEO BTW.
email, still very much the original internet killer app, is mostly crap these days not because it has changed, but because people are so so so bad at it