Getting email responses from busy people

23 Sep 2011

I’ve had the good fortune of working with some really smart and successful people during my career. As a young person, one problem with working with really successful people is that they get a ton of email. Some only see the subject lines on their phone before deleting them. 

I’ve picked up a few tricks for getting email responses from important/successful people:  

The SI Rules

1. Try to send no more than one email a day. 
2. Emails should be 3 sentences or less. Better if you can get the whole email in the subject line. 
3. If you need information, ask yes or no questions whenever possible. Never ask a question that requires a full sentence response.
4. When something is time sensitive, state the action you will take if you don’t get a response by a time you specify. 
5. Be as specific as you can while conforming to the length requirements. 
6. Bonus: include obvious keywords people can use to search for your email. 

Anecdotally, SI emails have a 10-fold higher response probability. The rules are designed around the fact that busy people who get lots of email love checking things off their list. SI emails are easy to check off! That will make them happy and get you a response. 

It takes more work on your end when writing an SI email. You often need to think more carefully about what to ask, how to phrase it succinctly, and how to minimize the number of emails you write. A surprising side effect of applying SI principles is that I often figure out answers to my questions on my own. I have to decide which questions to include in my SI emails and they have to be yes/no answers, so I end up taking care of simple questions on my own. 

Here are examples of SI emails just to get you started: 

Example 1

Subject: Is my response to reviewer 2 ok with you?

Body: I’ve attached the paper/responses to referees.

Example 2

Subject: Can you send my letter of recommendation to john.doe@someplace.com?

Body:

Keywords = recommendation, Jeff, John Doe.

Example 3

Subject: I revised the draft to include your suggestions about simulations and language

Revisions attached. Let me know if you have any problems, otherwise I’ll submit Monday at 2pm.