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One of my managers gave me some guidelines here. If it's more than 100 words, cap it at 100 and schedule a meeting. It clearly is information-dense to the degree where a quick question/answer session will be helpful.

From my own experience, I make sure to never ask more than one question in an email. If you ask more, people will answer the first and ignore the rest.

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I still find it useful to write those emails, even if I'm asking to talk to someone. The email serves as an agenda, it forces me to reason through the issue, and it serves as a long-term record of the issue. But the request for the meeting should come first.

I find reading the emails preferential to a meeting myself, but I guess a meeting is sometimes the only way to get people to pay attention.

It depends on the context, the workplace, and how you do it.

An agenda is an agenda, which is different than an argument/position that would be in an email. Usually when I get something like that, it's intended to be an "anchor" or written record of something that the other party wants. That triggers more bullshit email, as now a more formal artifact of whatever conversation happens in the meeting is needed.

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