No Stupid Questions

Yep that's fine push to production by Friday plz.

I've been reading the responses and it reminded me of the class I took called Business Communications, where they emphasized that CYA style communication was absolute nonsense, your responsibility when communicating is to convey information in a way that can be received, and if that doesn't happen it's your fault, not the recipient's, you can't control them only you.

So if this is just one person who misses all the questions, sure, it's them, but you still need to figure out how to get your answers. If it's everyone, it's you. Maybe these questions aren't amenable to email, maybe it's your format, if you want answers (and not just to prove you asked in some sort of gotcha game) you need to ask the people who aren't answering why they aren't.

Everywhere I've worked, people answer these by choosing a different font color and writing answers back in the email, but there are not a lot of questions by email. Maybe a note to "provide answers in BLUE" with the word blue in blue font would help?

I run into this when texting my mother.

She'll ask the same thing from 2 different perspectives (probably a better word but I can't think of it atm). Both are technically the same question, but I can't just say "yes" it "no", because it answers the question from just one or the other, but indicates the opposite from the other question's pov. Or sometimes needing to know between 2 possibilities she asks about one and then follows it up asking about the other.

For example, if we've recently met up to see my baby niblings (not even sure if this is a common use word, but I mean my nieces/nephews, aka her grandchildren), she could ask "Could you send me the photos you got in a text?" And then she would follow up with something like "Or did you already send them to my email?"

Now, I can't say "yes" or "no", I have to spell out what I did.

Other times it will be a question that she knows I picked one of the 2 options, but instead of just "did you do option A? Which would allow a quick answer "yes" which conveys that I did A, or I could say "no", which would indicate I did option B. One word, clear defined message. But she'll (sometimes during the process of replying- oof that's frustrating), she'll add "or did you do option B?" meaning I now have to spell out what I did.

I like efficient communication, and hate wasting a lot of words. And I'm any other circumstance, a 1 word answer works so well to convey the entire thing. But she almost always throws in a wrench by adding another question that conflicts with the ability to do that.

It's funny that some replies are saying your post itself is too wordy or long. People just can't focus on anything anymore. As for the suggestion of bullet points, I've had people reply a single answer to an email that just had three short bullet points. So no, it's not always because the questions are buried in text, it's because people react to the first thing they see and don't finish reading.

Even when we converse, we get across just one point at a time. You have to respect other people's time and bandwidth (Okay, one or two points).

The reader might think that your questions are overlaping, making adressing every question redundant. You might want clarity. The reader thinks you can figure it out based on their one answer. They don't want to spend the time to confirm that which you already have the tools to get to yourself.

I usually number my questions, makes it more obvious

I haven't done it very often, but the few times I haven't answered all off the questions in an email has been because some of the questions are a waste of time. I had an engineer recently ask me if I could move the location of where I was running a pipe through a floor grating. Changing the location would have changed nothing, made my job more difficult, and would have been a tripping hazard. All off this could have been avoided if they had gotten or from behind their desk and just gone and looked at what I was working on in person. I ignored their question and sent more pictures of the area. They finally said that I was good to proceed with my original plan.

I skip questions I don't want to answer.

ADHD

If you ask 10 questions and I know the answer to two of them, I’m going to answer the two and respond expecting someone else to answer the other questions.

If they are all directed at me and I’m the only person in the TO, then I’ll answer what I can. The times I don’t answer is because I either don’t have an answer or don’t want to answer it right now.

Instead of immediately blaming the other person, reflect upon your words. If someone sent you the same message with different but similar questions, how would you respond? Were the questions clear and concise with reasonable answers or do they need discussion? If yes/no is asked, is the question really a yes or no question?

Remember, as busy as you are, the other person may be busier or dealing with emergencies and they are at least attempting to respond rather than just no response at all.