I’ll take your word for it. It doesn’t feel inefficient to me.
Episode twelve billion and eight of ‘people vary’, I suppose.
Well, then, why don’t you like to split things into multiple emails?
I admit, if you ask me 5 questions and I am waiting on info for 2 of them, I will have a tendency to think I will wait until I get all the information you need. It seems neater. Then, if that information doesn’t come in, I may forget to answer any of your questions. .
Because it clogs up the email box on the other end, and it takes more time on both ends.
Which is part of the reason why it isn’t neater.
Plus which, in the meantime, I don’t know whether you even got the email, or whether you have the answers to any of the questions at all; and so I don’t know whether to send to you again, or try to call you up, or try asking somebody else. And I don’t have available the information you do have, and so may well be delayed in doing some of what I might otherwise be able to do.
Right, but I don’t want to clog up your email box and it takes more time on both ends. If I wait a few hours, i can have all the info in one email.
It’s the exact same psychology.
If you’re going to answer the email in a few hours and address all the questions, I’ve got no problem with that at all. In a lot of circumstances it can be longer than that.
If you’re going to forget about it altogether, or wait for weeks before answering it, or answer questions 1 and 3 but just plain ignore the others (saying ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I don’t know yet’ isn’t ignoring them), then I’m going to be frustrated.
That’s great!
Another handy hint: I got so sick of my boss not returning emails, which meant I couldn’t go ahead.
So I started adding a punch line to each project I was asking her about:
“We need to get this to Ed by tomorrow so we can make the printing deadline. So let me know if you want me to make those changes. If I don’t hear from you, it’s going out the door with yur blessing.”
This is what I always did.
This is my take, too. If someone keeps coming back to me with question after question, I generally wind up setting up a meeting anyway, so if you know in advance that there are more than two questions that require answers, just pick up the phone.
Plus, at least in my line of work, many responses to questions generate additional questions so just talking to someone so they can fire away is a way better use of everyone’s time regardless of their preferred manner of communication.
Also, half the execs in my company couldn’t read through a multi-paragraph email to save their lives, so it’s way better to ask verbally and take notes.
My answer to the original question is no, you can’t. You will never get more than the first two questions answered.
My workaround was multiple emails. But only a certain percentage of those emails would be answered and you have to resend the rest, several times.
But I usually couldn’t “just pick up the phone”, because protocol. The emailed questions were often in reference to a job I was bidding as a subcontractor. The questions were directed at the architects and engineers but I wasn’t allowed to contact them directly, the ROI’s (Request for Information) had to be submitted to the contractor.
There were reasons for this. The prime one, and the stated one, was that the contractor needed to make sure that that all bidders were working off the same information.
But there were other reasons. It would’ve been tempting for a subcontractor like myself to contact the architect with the intent of impressing them with my intellect and professionalism so that they might recommend me. We did not do public or government work and there was no rule that the low bidder got the job. We always vied to be a preferred vendor that got “last look”, a chance to meet the low bid and snag the job.
While this was a good idea whenever I did it and the architects always loved me 
, they tended to be annoyed by all those OTHER bidders calling them with questions and trying to impress them, so that rule was born. But OMG, it was practically impossible to get a list of questions answered,
That does work best for some people.
It doesn’t work well if they’re on different time schedules. And it often doesn’t work well, especially for complicated questions, because it leaves no written trail to refer back to.
That’d be great, if my boss ever did it. He’s too busy staring at a computer screen to let the analog world intrude. So it’s got to be email or a Slack-type message.
Besides, if he did answer the phone he’d bark something like “I’m too pressured, put everything on hold, I don’t have time for this!”
And then, when everyone was screaming because everything’s missing deadlines, I’d have nothing in writing as to why.
I love emails/texts for the paper trail.
Back in the day we used to call that “having a conference call at some odd-ass fucking time”.
This may come as a shock to some of you, but people actually managed to discuss “complicated questions” before the advent of Slack, Zoom, or email.
Hey, I remember writing letters!
To expand on this. One of the big problems with the “remote” electronic office IMHO is that people seem to assume that just because they sent something electronically, it is (or will be) “done”. For example, if I were to send one of my team members a 100 page Powerpoint deck (or a text-wall email with 50 questions for that matter) 10 minutes before a meeting, it is not reasonable to believe that individual will have read and processed it in time for the meeting. Even if it’s hours or days before, that individual may be so swamped with work that the email I sent is like 100 in their queue to get to.
And yet, very often I see people act as if just because they sent something to someone, it should have automatically been “processed” without regard for time or workload.
And you’re a long way from the OP here.
I don’t know which “people” are doing what you describe, but I’d be willing to bet they were always that stupid, even before working from home.
This is true.
I don’t see how it would be changed by sending 50 separate emails instead of one, though.
I don’t know why you think those people are any more or less “stupid” than you. You’re sending someone an email with 5 or however many questions with the expectation that the recipient should drop whatever they are doing to go through each one and answer them. You’re basically sending them a “survey” to fill out.
These people aren’t stupid. They are just lazy and thoughtless.
Modern American business management has developed a real schizophrenia. The workers are stuck trying to navigate a no-win situation.
Premise 1: Management rewards each worker for doing their job. Accomplishing their tasks. “Staying in their lane”. And they pile on enough work that going full tilt on the most important stuff on your daily list takes more than 8 hours per day. All the above is true whether you are a worker bee or a manager-coordinator yourself, a la @msmith537 or myself when I was in a similar role in SMB.
Premise 2: We all work as a team, and providing “customer service” to our fellow workers is a big part of that.
Premise 3: Everything touches everything. Everything is so specialized that nobody can do any whole job end-to-end without consulting others who have more / different details than you do. We do that necessary consulting via email so it can be done non-real time and leave a record for reasons both legit and CYA.
So … You’re graded almost entirely on #1. As is whoever you’re corresponding with. #2 is paid lip-service by management, and therefore by you too. Everyone else’s number 3 is a colossal distraction to your #1. And your #3 is a colossal distraction to every else’s #1.
The result is you and everyone else respond by focusing on #1 which means responding to incoming #3s gets a lick and a promise at best. While bitching about the fact nobody else does a good job on your #3s.
Bottom line: No wonder the rats are feeling stressed and the system doesn’t work. It’s an inherently broken design.
Nowhere in any of my posts have I said anything about a timeframe or urgency, that has been added by other posters, especially you. I was only complaining about incompleteness. You have also how hugely exaggerated the quantity from “maybe 5” questions to a 100 page powerpoint deck or a text-wall message with 50 questions. I’m not sure how you justify that.
And it should have been obvious to an attentive reader that I was calling the people stupid who would do what you have described, expecting responses to be “automatically … ‘processed’ without regard for time or workload.” That is very different from the behavior that I described in my OP.
If the situation is such that you’ve got no business asking the person any questions, then you shouldn’t be sending such emails at all.
If the situation is such that you’ve only got good reason to ask the person one or two questions, then you shouldn’t be asking five.
If the situation is such that you have good reason to need five different answers from that person, why on earth is it unreasonable to ask them? And how does it improve the situation any to send five separate emails?
And how is it “lazy and thoughtless” to send the questions by email, which is a format that allows answering when one can get to it, instead of showing up in person or calling the person on the phone, both of which work best with an instant response, and neither of which provides a written record so the person needing the information can re-check it without again bothering the person who was needed to provide it?
If your work environment (or your personal one for that matter) expects an instant response to every email, then your work environment is screwed up. That is the fault neither of email nor of the person who actually needs the answer to more than one question. I agree that said person shouldn’t expect an instant response; but that’s not what the OP was trying to accomplish.