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Comment by parenthephobia | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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And yet this is ubiquitous. Nearly nobody reads the whole thing, or if they do they respond to only the most interesting part. The rest is ignored.

I have a rule: Ask exactly one question in an email. Because asking more doesn't ever work.

That's a great rule - also, always ask the question in the first sentence.

The trick to asking more than one question is to number them.

Dear Ms. Busy Client,

In order to complete Project X on time, we need your decisions about the following by end of day Friday, please:

1) How many widgets will be required? 2) Do you prefer the red or the green? 3) If we order the widgets from China instead of Mexico, we can save $10 per widget, but delivery will take twice as long. We believe this trade-off is worthwhile because foo. Please confirm that this is acceptable to you. 4) etc.

Thanks, your humble vendor

Then if you still don't get an answer, you ask for a meeting or call like you would have to anyway, but at least you have a handy checklist to make it efficient.

The problem with your several questions are that you won’t get an answer to the easy ones before they have had time to think about the harder ones.

In this example it might not make a difference, but sometimes you can make some progress if you get to know if it should be red or green even before you know if they want to move production to China.

Most importantly, many questions make the email feel more overwhelming. Three short emails can each often get an immediate response. An email with three questions needs to be found time to answer.

Answering "yes" to "A or B" questions is a terrible approach - if I had to start defining communication anti-patterns it'd be one of the easiest examples. Saying "always" or "the first one" isn't hard, and actually answers the question.

> 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.

The point is not to write all the extra words in the first place.

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