
I tried emailing like a CEO and it made my life better - ajoy
https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/i-tried-emailing-like-your-boss?utm_term=.akmXrGr77w#.reA9OXO33o
======
splittingTimes
I started to follow this approach [1] 6 month ago and it is amazing how much
clearer my own thoughts in communication have become.

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

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.

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.

===

[1] [https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-
pre...](https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-precision)

~~~
bshimmin
_so try to fit all content in one pane, so the recipient doesn’t have to
scroll_

Oh no, have we introduced "the fold" into emails too, after a decade of
forlornly trying to persuade people it doesn't exist on the web?

~~~
pc86
If you look at heatmaps of user interaction with webpages, it absolutely does
exist.

------
hnrodey
Rules for good emails

1\. Keep the message as short as necessary but no shorter.

2\. Put the most important information at the top of the message.

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.

4\. If you need to send a long email with many details, put the most important
information at the top (ie. what the reader _needs_ to know) and then fill in
the body with details he/she can choose to indulge.

Example

Hey Jane, I need your input on how to prioritize my current work. Can you
provide guidance on where I should focus?

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.

Lemme know.

~~~
EGreg
For #1, what I have found works best is to nix the huge amount of text you'd
otherwise write in the email and put it in a link. A document maybe, or better
yet a beautiful portal that works on desktop and mobile.

That way the email is short AND the link can be reshared!

~~~
hnrodey
That's a terrific idea, if that kind of CMS-ish system is available to you or
within your organization. Unfortunately I've never been exposed to or have
much experience with something like that : (

~~~
frandroid
> CMS-ish system

That's Google Docs or Office 365.

~~~
hnrodey
Office 365 is the closest I've experienced. I actually kinda like it. My
biggest use-case is wider spread documentation that is inappropriate to
distribute as an attachment.

------
albertgoeswoof
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.

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.

~~~
jstanley
> The author has decided to provide poor communication

On the contrary! The author has decided to provide efficient, immediate,
communication, instead of vaguely planning to send a more detailed reply later
if she maybe gets around to it.

If everybody treated email this way it would be 100x more efficient. If her
reply doesn't contain the info you need, just reply back asking for the info
you need, and she'll reply within minutes.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
But what if you don't know the information you need to know? Or if you're
worried about looking incompetent by asking because she always sends such curt
replies? Or maybe you're just hacked off that you crafted an email to try to
convey a point in a clear, concise manner and she just responded with a one
word reply and you have no idea whether she read it and understood it at all

~~~
jstanley
They all sound like your problems, not hers.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
They’ll be hers when she’s fired

~~~
MichaelMoser123
You just wrote a concise reply as advocated by the linked article.

------
account0099099
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.

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.

~~~
vidarh
It works, but as a general rule, you need to include more fluff than the
person above you in the hierarchy unless you know they're fine with you being
shorter. The trick is figuring out just how much more fluff is ok.

But what _will_ come across as "curt" or "mean" is if your e-mails are
substantially less fluffy than those of your boss or your co-workers. You need
to adapt to the style in use in the business, not because it is objectively
curt or mean, but because people judge whether or not you're being curt or
mean subjectively based on their base of comparison, and that is your co-
workers.

~~~
amyjess
> But what will come across as "curt" or "mean" is if your e-mails are
> substantially less fluffy than those of your boss or your co-workers.

You have to be especially careful to not treat people who don't report to you
as if they're your subordinates. It's bad to do that to people on your own
team, and it's worse to do that to people on another team. A good way to build
a bad relationship with someone is to treat them like your lackey when they're
not even in the same reporting chain as you.

I've been treated like this before, by someone on another team who sent me a
number feature requests that involve significant new work, and by "requests",
I mean "demands", without any fluff or niceties or anything. He did this
without opening a new ticket (in a company where anything requiring new work
needs one), without CCing my boss, and only rarely CCing his boss. This has
always resulted in me switching into full-on form letter mode: "Please make
your feature request by opening a JIRA ticket in the [redacted] project, and
management will choose how to prioritize it.", with my boss and my skip level
CC'd on the email.

~~~
vidarh
Absolutely agree. Even when in the same reporting chain, I'd consider it quite
bad form because it leaves the people in between with reduced visibility, and
often they might have information that makes them prioritize differently or
assign different people.

You can get away with some reduced formality when addressing people reporting
in to a layer below you but on another team, but "get away with" being the
operative part. You will not get away with bypassing managers - even if you
manage to sneak it past them now, it'll make people look out for future
attempts.

Sometimes if you know everyone well it may be ok to e-mail someone direct and
cc their manager and address it to both and suggest the person you're sending
it to would be a good person to carry out the work, but I'd take care to make
it clear it's up to said manager unless I have very strong reasons to ask for
a specific person and then too the manager should at least be informed..

I've been on both ends of this, and more than once told off my managers for
bypassing me because of the disruption caused.

------
lkrubner
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.

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.

~~~
dceddia
I feel the same way. Recruiters are also bad about this. With email, I have
time to think through my response and (maybe more importantly) think of a nice
way to say no. On the phone, faced with a salesy fast-talking recruiter, I am
definitely at a disadvantage. I'm more likely to be talked into further calls
and whatnot. I'm pretty sure they know this.

------
rwc
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.

~~~
drb311
The key is:

1\. Reply now

2\. Do the best you can in the time you can spare

It's email. If people need more they can ask for it.

At least now they know you'll reply.

------
gregmac
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.

Here's my take:

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.

Quick questions are better done over chat, if for no other reason than the
single-line interface tends to encourage single-line questions.

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?

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.

[0] [https://jamesclear.com/keystrokes](https://jamesclear.com/keystrokes)

------
gk1
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:
[https://www.gkogan.co/blog/clarity/](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/clarity/)

------
ThomaszKrueger
When I see the phrase "emailing like a CEO" I imagine mainly _not asking for
opinions or decisions_ rather making _statements of fact_ or _decisions_. 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.

In the case of asking for time off, my rationale is to avoid making someone
spend time evaluating if my request is acceptable.

------
uladzislau
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.

~~~
vidarh
You can as a general rule not be as informal as your superior (unless you know
the person well enough), but need not be _much_ more formal.

Put the most important bits first. Be as brief as possible while still being
courteous. Recap at the end, including specifically calling out necessary next
steps.

My experience is that people often tend to include detail that is only of
interest to them, often because they're not certain their request will stand
on its own.

Only spend time to add information you're certain is necessary (and I know I
often err on this); if your manager needs more info to make a decision,
they'll ask.

People will often be grateful if you spare them the details of things they
don't need the details of, as long as you can show you've done your work
if/when they _do_ ask. The more they can trust you to have data to back up
what you ask for, the less they'll actually ask.

------
throw2016
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.

It's not simply an issue of length, its communication and I guess maturity,
experience and savvy.

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.

~~~
sbarre
Also when you're the boss you can reply however you want and people will
make/take the time to figure out the missing details, because they have to.

Try those short replies to your boss for a while and see how it goes. ;-)

------
hashkb
On the flip side, I take my time to write detailed replies with full
explanations of issues. Usual reply: "can u hop on a call"

~~~
cwilkes
Being snarky I would ask you how is that working out for you?

I bet on the call your replies are short. So just reverse the order: make your
emails short and to the point with the abstract of your reasoning behind it.
End with you can discuss in detail on a conference call. I bet no one takes
you up on it.

~~~
bshimmin
Sometimes when I write a lovely, thorough, well-crafted email and get a "can u
hop on a call 2 discuss" response, I "hop" on that call and simply read out my
email. Occasionally I add little pauses to make it sound like I'm not reading,
if I can be bothered.

------
parenthephobia
> 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.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
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.

~~~
twobyfour
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.

~~~
Ma8ee
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.

------
mgv11
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.

~~~
gk1
I don’t understand why people flaunt their unread counts. To seem important?
To me it just says you are indecisive or unorganized.

~~~
buxtehude
The flip side of that is what I sincerely have believed for many many years: I
don't understand why people flaunt their read counts.

I read all the email from people on my team.

I also receive a lot of email from various sources in the organization as well
as external sources - and sometimes all I'm looking for is the subject to
decide if it's worth my time to open it and read it.

I feel that not all of that non-team based email is worth my time opening,
reading/scanning, then archiving or deleting - time that adds up over the
years: How many days of your life have you spent organizing your inbox so that
your number is 0?

A stack is a beautiful thing :)

If I don't care about it, it goes away with minimal effort after a little
time.

I don't want to be a slave to my email inbox - and at the same time I value
the sources of the incoming emails that I don't always read - I read some just
not all - and that's ok with me and I do that when it's socially acceptable
(not trying to be a jerk about it).

------
glorkk
> Like any good member of the proletariat who wants nothing more than to serve
> capitalism [...]

Never change, Buzzfeed.

------
makecheck
I would say, do your best to imagine the receiver’s Inbox and help them.

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.)

------
seniorsassycat
Jeff Bezos is famous for forwarding emails with just a question mark to
employees when he receives complaints from customers.

[https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-to-receive-a-question-
ma...](https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-to-receive-a-question-mark-e-mail-
from-Jeff-Bezos-at-Amazon-Inc)

~~~
albertgoeswoof
A senior editor at buzzfeed is not Jeff Bezos

------
falcolas
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.

On the flip side, they probably deserve more than a casual glance and a two
word response.

~~~
rbcgerard
Yes - or you get an email about X, but you need to know more about Y to come
to a decision on X, so that X email lingers while you wait for info on Y

------
joshuaheard
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.

------
jasonmaydie
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.

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.

~~~
gtsteve
> it's not urgent enough to call or physically reach out to me about it it's
> not that big a deal

Exactly. If someone has a problem with me taking a couple of hours to get back
to an e-mail I say, "you wouldn't send the fire brigade a postcard would you?"

~~~
StavrosK
"Thank you for saving my house from the fire last week. XOXO"

------
MichaelMoser123
"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.”"

Wow that's some deep social commentary - similar to Gogol's "overcoat"

------
danvoell
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.

------
LeoJiWoo
Probably should be a disclaimer to articles like this.

Doing X like Person Y makes life Z really only works well when you are
basically very similar to person Y.

Emailing like a CEO works best when you are a CEO, and are above office
politics.

Probably shouldn't email like a CEO if you aren't one.

------
otterpro
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.

~~~
shostack
Not only that, but if I see a snippet of a request or chat in my Slack phone
notifications, I can't read the whole thing without removing it from my
notification queue.

Often I get things that I need to get to a desktop to properly respond to.

At least with email I can "Mark Unread" or label/put in a folder. I wish Slack
had a way to snooze notifications while still letting you read the whole
thing.

------
DoreenMichele
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.

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.

So this article is kind of timely for me.

------
internetman55
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.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Here's the next rule for you:

DO NOT TOP POST

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.

Stop top posting!

~~~
amyjess
I've worked at four companies over ten years. Everyone at all four companies
top posts exclusively.

Bottom posting is a good way to be branded "that weirdo who can't follow
standard procedure". In the business world, this old Japanese proverb applies:
"The nail that sticks up gets hammered down."

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
This article is already about changing your email habits. You think the bottom
poster is getting stranger looks than the guy who only writes 2 word replies?

------
polock
It seems like dumb. Everyone has their owns style. Don't copy anyone's and
make your own character and style.

------
EGreg
_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_

Really? What's his email? I think I direct-emailed him before at blogmaverick
and didn't get a response.

~~~
IncRnd
this search:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=email+mark+cuban](https://www.google.com/search?q=email+mark+cuban)

had this as first hit: [https://www.wikihow.com/Contact-Mark-
Cuban](https://www.wikihow.com/Contact-Mark-Cuban)

------
shadowRAMM
I would like to add this bit to anyone attempting this:

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.

Subjects of emails trigger anti-spam. So be choice, sparse, and unique if
possible with email subjects.

carry on.

------
wyclif
I don't wanna email like a CEO.

I want Inbox Zero for Life: [https://xph.us/2013/01/22/inbox-zero-for-
life.html](https://xph.us/2013/01/22/inbox-zero-for-life.html)

------
eitally
The issue with standardizing on two word replies is that people will
eventually stop writing you in the first place. This can _feel_ good, but it's
usually a bad sign, whether you're an IC or a manager.

~~~
jstanley
She's not saying "don't tell people what they need to know", she's saying
"don't agonise over sending the perfect email, just give them the information
they need".

------
yuhong
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.

~~~
sushid
What is being a Yishan-style CEO except for the fact that you're not a
founder/co-founder? I'm not sure how this is relevant to the article above?

~~~
yuhong
Look up "yishan dehrmann"

------
Froyoh
I have a strong urge to keep unread emails at a minimum. Mark all as read is
very handy.

------
ameshkov
Ok thx

------
akud
It sounds like what the author really needs is a chatroom.

------
ChrisArchitect
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

------
arbie
This article desperately needs a TL;DR.

~~~
donquichotte
She started writing shorter and more concise emails (but, alas, not shorter
and more concise articles) and liked it.

~~~
sdenton4
Spend your time where the money is. Journalists aren't paid at the end of the
day for their email word counts... And, probably, neither are you.

------
kapauldo
Short emails make you sound like a dick. I wish there was a solution.

