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.

My rule is more than 2 questions and it’s a phone call.

People are lazy and stupid, you can ask one question at a time or better yet setup a meeting to ask them verbally, you aren’t getting any answers otherwise

ADHD

Sometimes I’m busy man and trying to get something done

People hate to read. I write emails that try to cover all bases, because I can’t assume grown adults with advanced degrees know what’s going on. Sadly, they’ll not only not read it, but ask me to write less. Cutting the word count only leads to more confusion.

I’m so done with humanity sometimes.

Use bullet points as it helps. A lot of people suck at reading and a lot aren’t great at writing. Some peoples’ styles are also just not very compatible.

I had a trouble with this a lot when I was younger and got told:

• short sentences
• bullet points
• if all else fails multiple emails with a single question because apparently I have all the time in the world.

I have the same question, as I will receive replies through text messages that are like this:

Me: hey! Are we still meeting today? Where would be good for you? I’m open from 10am until 6pm so just let me know when works best.

Them: I can still meet today

I get responses like this all the time, and I don’t feel like my initial text is too much.

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.

I KNOW THIS ONE AND THE ANSWER IS : IT"S MICROSOFT’S FAULT.

Back in the day when Email first became popular, it was normal and accepted use to do “in-line-quoting”. You would hit “reply” and get the text of the original mail with a quote character, mostly “>” in the begining of the line. Then you would put some empty lines at the point where you wanted to answer/comment and type your reply in the middle of the email you received, easily giving context to your words, and making it obvious to what this comment relates, while also showing which part was by the sender and which by you (due to the quotation symbols)

This was a very good system, and then came MICROSOFT OUTLOOK

and they defaulted to giving you a empty page when clicking reply and just dumping the whole mail you replied to somewhere below, out of sight.

everyone using Outlook started “top-posting” to the annoyance of every intelligent being in the galaxy, but because Outlook was the first email experience many people had, the culture of in-line-quoting was destroyed by the unwashed microsoft masses.

fast-forward to today, where a young person (that is below 50) posts about a topic just to vent, and a old person (over 9000) replies with a sincere history lessen from a time where even email were better.

yours truely,

someone who is still salty about that and just decided to make a youtube rant about it.

Hi based on you current post,

Why do people insist on answering only one question?

**Do people just not read? ** I would say most people have a lot to read, especially emails, I get dozens of them daily, archive a few thousands yearly. So I will gloss over, see if it’s addressed to me, of not I will probably wait until it becomes my problem to react/reply

Are people thatLazy? No people are busy, is this the same question as the first, out a request for alternatives causes to not reading?

What is going on? This question is vague, I see no point in replying, except maybe an opportunity to troll, or belittle you in this email that had now accumulated 30 people over 7 departments, and possibly one or two customer that were involved a week ago when the thread was about something entirely different.

In short, be specific, and format your message for readability. ;

Name whoever you expect to reply. Split your questions.
Make sure they’re actual questions you need definitive answers to.

Yeah this drives me crazy. It’s to the point where I have to drip feed my questions one after the other sometimes. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

As others have suggested, in order to communicate effectively, you have to tailor your message to your audience. Dumb it down, break it down, shorten it, order questions from most to least important or most to least relevant to the recipient, or just badger them relentlessly with follow ups until you have the information you need and talk shit about them behind their back to any competent coworkers you have.

Regardless, they’re not going to just magically change, so it’s up to you to do something different if you want a different result than you’re getting now.

For me it’s not intentional. I get fixated on one of the questions that require more mental energy than the others and then forget to answer the rest. I have no excuses. My bad.

Reading comprehension has gone down the tubes. I dunno if it’s from people watching too many TikToks and their attention span can’t handle reading more than one sentence anymore, or what, but I have definitely noticed a change in people’s ability to read and understand the content of what they just read.

Where I work, my old boss never wrote anything down, did not like to communicate via email, and insisted on phone calls/verbal meetings instead. When they announced they were taking a new job, we begged them to create an SOP of all the things they did with detailed instructions because NONE of it had ever been written down. We were told no, they couldn’t do that. No explanation other than “I can’t.” And I’m convinced that they simply couldn’t read, or could BARELY read.

So I created the SOP instead, detailed as hell, everything in one place. Sections, subsections, hyperlinks, it’s all there. 2 new employees come into the office, I’m supposed to train them. I do, and I show them the SOP, tell them “everything you need to know is in this SOP”, so that AFTER I train them, they can reference it.

They never reference it, ever. They ask me how to do the things they’ve forgotten instead. I just point them to the correct section in the SOP and tell them to read it. BUT THEY DON’T READ. It’s insane! How do they get by in life in general!?