I was hanging out chatting with a new friend recently, a developer, and he gave me the coolest email trick. When he’s sending email out, he puts the point of the message up top, and then puts in a line saying –Detail: Do Not Read– and then dumps all of the information leading up to the point underneath. So, an email might look like this.
Subject: Re: connectivity to application
Done. Matt can now access the app.
Next steps:
* Matt, please show Laura how to access the app.
* Laura, please finish up testing.
————–Detail: Do Not Read———————————————————
2 screens worth of information on trouble-shooting; how he and Matt figured out what the issue was and resolved it.
So, here’s why I think this is a brilliant trick.
Most of the folks I know need to make daily decisions, and complete tasks, and tell other folks what’s been decided & when our stuff has completed so that they can do our jobs. And many of us– particularly us geeks– collect a lot of detail and rationalizations and information about why we made a particular decision, and how we completed a particular task, that we desperately want to provide to the other folks that we work with.
Here’s the problem: they don’t need to know, they don’t want to know, and they don’t care about the details. They just need to know that connectivity has been restored so they can got on with our lives. I am always trying to get the awesome geeks I work with to write me short emails, with what they need from me in the subject line, and a few bullet points at the top of the email telling me what they want me to do, and what I need to know in order to do it. And my brilliant geek coworkers really struggle with this– they just want to tell me more details, they want to share the joy of their knowledge with me. I love this about geek culture; and it makes it so much harder to work with people when I get three-page long emails and I have to read and analyze them all to understand what is being requested of me.
My pal’s tricks does a couple of cool things:
- it lets him put his notes somewhere, get them out of his brain and on the record, so that he can delete all the information he collected while completing his task from his computer and more importantly from his brain;
- it satisfies his geeky need to tmi his coworkers with extraneous technical detail that probably doesn’t interest them; and
- just in case one of his coworkers is interested in the detail, now or later, it’s all there.
I’m telling you, I think this is brilliant. I’m going to suggest it to all my people.
With the caveat, that I don’t think you should do this in emails sent to external clients.
For internal communication, though– with your project managers and your fellow geeks– this is just about the best trick ever.
N
