Do people just not read? Are people that lazy? What is going on?
I can read
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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No Stupid Questions
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S-trier trolling right here.
Been doing email since it began. Same frustrations.
Solutions (workarounds):
- Email is structured with "executive summary" & "detail". That way I can write all the words I want but people can only read the first paragraph.
- Never ask questions. Tell them what I'm going to choose, & give them opportunity to disagree. That way if they don't respond usefully I can take their "non-response" as a response & proceed anyway.
- If I need to ask a question, use a phone call or go to their desk, or (shudder) make a meeting.
No.
I started listing the questions as 1. 2. 3. And so on. Which helped a lot.
I hate when i do that and they still refuse to answer more than one
At least now you can rely back with “can you also provide feedback for #1 & #3?”
Repeat until all items are cleared. Not perfect, but at least you don’t have to waste time rewording a follow-up email.
Because people choose the easiest question to answer. You can't change people, but you can change how you communicate.
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.
I usually number my questions, makes it more obvious
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
Yep that's fine push to production by Friday plz.
If you've got questions, put them in bullet points.
I'm not scanning a wall of text to find everything.
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.
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
Tbh I would rather have someone do this not realizing I'm expecting a reply from them than to reply only to some of it, because when the latter happens it's usually like pulling teeth to get a response to the rest.
Gonna be honest, always write my mails structured with listed out questions that try to be specific yet not overloaded with info (hard to do, but possible. Mostly) and yet...
I get two answers to my three questions, with one answer even on topic, and the other being astrology divination of polar bear's butthole position over png of africa.
Yeah I get that too.
Should the report be sent by mail or e-mail?
- frozen yogurt
Considering your wording in the last paragraph, I'm going to guess that your writing style is frequently overwhelming. Making sure that questions are clearly isolated (I'd suggest using numeric lists or bullet points) makes it clear what response you're expecting.
Additionally, if you're asking several difficult questions, it's likely that people will lose the thread partway through.
This. It's pretty common in my industry for people to either copy and paste your bullets into their reply and put their responses directly after each or edit your original email in the chain with the answers in red below the bullets.
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"Do people just not read? Are people that lazy? What is going on?"
Not much, what is going on with you?
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.
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You can get mad at everyone else or you can start playing to the lowest common denominator.
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Question 1
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Question 2
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Question 3
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Few people can focus enough to read.
I work in a technical field. In the past few years I’ve learned that interacting by email usually requires one-line sentences or bullet points, with any questions being numbered. No fluff, no secondary thoughts or possibilities. Keep it as minimal as possible.
It still fails to elicit a coherent response about half the time, but it’s the best I’ve found so far.
It didn’t use to be like this. But what’s to blame; screen addiction, microplastics, covid, increased stress, … ?
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