When I realized this principle, I experienced around a 2x or 3x increase in my rate of causing-people-to-do-things-over-email, out of the “usually doesn’t work” range into the “usually works” range. I find myself repeating this advice a lot in an attempt to boost the effectiveness of friends interested in effective altruism and related work, so I’m making a blog post to make it easier.
Part of the intuition I’m trying to convey is to think of an email as a subroutine that will run inside someone else’s email/to-do workflow. To illustrate by example, my friend, let’s call her Alice, recently sent me the following email:
(ignore the relaxed grammar; that’s not the point here)
| Subject: dates implemented, draggable selections implemented, magic insertion implemented |
| Message:
(magic insertion = draggable thing at the bottom of the cell that auto-expands contents inside) hopefully objects in cells should get going by tonight too, and working + draggable images btw, in addition to ad-hoc scheduling, would you be up for having a weekly call with the team about various company stuff? |
At first glance this email appears to be giving you a news update, but then ends by asking you for an action: to schedule a meeting. Even without changing the content at all, it would have been better to do this in two separate email threads:
Thread 1:
| Subject: dates implemented, draggable selections implemented, magic insertion implemented |
| Message:
(magic insertion = draggable thing at the bottom of the cell that auto-expands contents inside) hopefully objects in cells should get going by tonight too, and working + draggable images |
Thread 2:
| Subject: weekly calls? |
| Message:
btw, in addition to ad-hoc scheduling, would you be up for having a weekly call with the team about various company stuff? |
For some, this improvement is painfully obvious. But in case it’s not, I’ll elaborate why. Upon receiving Alice’s original message,
- If you read it carefully, you’ll have to decide whether your criterion for removing the email from your attention (say, using gmail’s archive function, mark-as-read, archive, or re-labelling) is have I read this news update? or have I scheduled or declined the meetings?.
- If you read it uncarefully, you might just archive it as soon as you feel you’ve understood the news update, and then Alice doesn’t get the action she wanted from you.
Either way, Alice has made it very slightly cognitively trickier for you to manage the “done” state of this email.
As an intuition pump, I told Alice to think about an email as a subroutine that will run inside someone else’s email/to-do workflow. When programming, you would never use the same boolean variable name for whether your email recipient “has read my news update” and “has scheduled or declined a meeting”. So in general, when you write an email, ask “exactly when do I want my reader to remove this thread from her attention?” (via whatever her attention-removal method is, be it mark-unread, archive, label “done”, or what have you). Then choose your subject line to make the “done” state easier for her intuit, like when you’re programming and you choose variable names to make their meanings more intuitive.
You may not have noticed this effect, but when your attention is scarce (say, you get 100+ emails per day, or you have very little time for email), you are more likely to drop the ball on an email whose “done” status is intuitively ambiguous to you.
Marketing professionals know all about this, and know to ask for a very simple and clear call-to-action at any step of a marketing funnel to maximize their response rate. But not enough people apply this principle to improve the response rate of their hand-crafted emails. Now that I do it, aside from hopefully being less annoying to my recipients, I seem to have significantly increased the response rate I’m getting. And since I’m tired of repeating this advice, here it is for posterity: When you’re in Alice’s position, do yourself and your recipient a favor, and separate your action-requests into separate threads.