Myself, I would always answer the 5 question email immediately.
Now, sometimes the answers might look like this.
That’s probably possible, but it wouldn’t be simple. It would add a level of complexity to the project and would result in a cost increase in excess of 10K. If your client is still interested, let me know and I’ll explore it further.
No problem! That is a standard service included on all our projects
I’m not sure, I’ll need to check with the factory. I’ll get back to you once I have an answer.
Depends on the finish. Let me know what finish your client is interested in and I’ll get pricing.
There’s not a simple answer to that. I’ll give you a call.
Now, I didn’t have to drop everything and do research. I immediately answered what I could and deferred the rest.
I came off as responsive. I managed to avoid doing some PITA research for something the client probably wasn’t serious about. I threw an item back to the client for more info and I dealt with the question I didn’t want to answer in writing.
In your line of work, would all those questions have been related to one project? Because in mine, I might need to email the counselor to ask about:
Kid #1, who hasn’t been turning in work
Kid #2, who has a 504 in place and I am not sure if I am in compliance
A presentation she and I are doing together next week for the faculty
A schedule I’d like her to change
An upcoming absence she has and if I need to cover anything while she is gone.
Each of those could easily spiral into it’s own exchange, and all require her to be a very different “headspace” to respond. I would put them in five separate emails, so that she could respond as was appropriate, and so she could search her email for a key term next week when the issue came up again.
ETA: and frankly, if someone sent me a wall of text about all 5 of those issues in one email, I’d be a little annoyed and I’d wish they’d broken them up.
ETA: another argument against “bundling” is that some questions need to be forwarded and others do not. If several unrelated issues are in one email, it makes it hard to forward the whole thing to the person who can answer it with just “Would you look into this?” at the top.
Yes these 5 questions would’ve all been related to not just one project, but one aspect of the project, all at least somewhat relevant to everyone on the copy list. And I probably would’ve had 5 other email chains going on other aspects of the job. I could only break it up so far, too much volume.
We had to be very careful with copying and forwarding - and I often had to ask and answer questions regarding costs and pricing separately to a limited set of people - sending the wrong email to the wrong person could be disastrous when money was involved.
I put large home automation systems in multi-million dollar homes. Each project required coordination with about a dozen different parties, and I had dozens of back and forth questions for everyone. We tried to handle as much of this as we could during meetings, but it was endless, each meeting generated more questions than it answered.
Ann_Hedonia, your example of concise answers is the holy grail of email!
See, I would love to get all five questions at once, because if someone asked one at a time (especially if there were minutes or hours between each one), I’d probably spend too much time going into needless detail.
Whereas doing the “look how responsive I’m being” thing would give me permission to only spend a couple of minutes giving five quick answers. And to be honest, they’d be almost as good as the longer answers I’d research and obsess over (and let my other work slide).
Probably not. In many workplaces, the majority of people ‘get paid’ to do some specific work, or to do projects directed by their supervisor. Emails from another department asking a bunch of complicated questions that require tracking down information are not part of what their raises and retention are based on (or are a very minor part), so they’re very low priority. People will do enough to look like they’re not ignoring you, but if you’re expecting them to research five different things they’re probably not going to spend time on it and instead will just send something back and hope you forget or bother someone else.
LSLguy’s explanation of how this ususally works is also good.