You need something from somebody busy. A decision, an approval, an answer about which way to go. So you write the message, and because you are being thorough you write it in the order the situation happened to you. Background, then the investigation, then the two options, and right at the bottom, the thing you actually need.
They read the first paragraph on their phone between meetings, decide it deserves proper attention, and it joins the pile of things to come back to. It does not come back.
Lead with the ask. First line, before anything else: what you need, from whom, by when. I need a yes or no on moving the cutover to the eighth, from you, by Thursday. Everything else goes underneath, and the reader takes as much of it as they want.
Then give them options rather than an open question. An open question asks a busy person to design something. Two named options with a recommendation asks them to agree or disagree, which is a tenth of the effort. Option A keeps the date and drops the reporting screen. Option B slips a week and ships everything. I would take A, and here is why.
Say what happens if they do not reply. If I have not heard by Thursday I will go with A. That one sentence does more work than any amount of chasing. It turns silence into a decision instead of a hole, and it quietly names the cost of ignoring you.
One decision per message. Two asks in a single note reliably produce an answer to one of them, and you will spend a week working out which.
And if the history is long, do not point at a thread with sixty messages in it. Summarise it in four lines yourself. Nobody has ever scrolled up to reconstruct your context, and asking them to is really asking them to do your job.
None of this is about being blunt. Warmth costs almost nothing and is worth keeping. It is about where you put the one sentence that matters, and the answer is always the top.
– Asael Shinder
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