How to reply quickly and effectively in work threads and messages
I often spend up to 20 minutes carefully crafting replies to ensure they’re clear and effective, which is very long imo
Even though I’ve even received compliments from a director for handling cross-functional misunderstandings. I know my messages hit the mark, but I’m looking for ways to speed up my replies and messaging in group chats without losing clarity. I’m curious if anyone has tips, tricks, or frameworks to make the process more efficient. How do you all manage to be both clear and quick in your communications?
Any best practices or advice would be awesome
Discussion
(3 comments)- 1
2 months agoEmployee @ RobinhoodI try to respond immediately.
- 12 months agoEntry-Level Software Engineer [SDE 1] at Amazon
I echo your frustration as I used to overthink writing every email/slack message especially when talking with senior leaders in my career.
The thing is, once you have established a certain level of credibility -> speed is better than exact correctness in giving answers, especially for questions that aren't super impactful/important.
Similar to Jonathan's answer, I advise being comfortable giving answers more quickly, especially without knowing the full context. You actually can see this on Taro itself, as many renowned posters will provide answers to questions that don't even have full context needed to give an extremely accurate answer.
- 12 months agoEng @ Taro
For work threads and messages, you can be more succinct. It's actually probably better to be succinct otherwise people will glaze over your messages when there's a wall of text.
The places where it's more appropriate to take some more time are documentation or email, or anything that is more of a source of truth that has a large audience looking at it, so lack of clarity can cause confusion or slow people down.
Other Great Discussions
![Senior Software Engineer [E5] at Meta company logo](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffirebasestorage.googleapis.com%2Fv0%2Fb%2Ftech-career-growth.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fcompany_logos%252Fmeta.jpeg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3Da7a5bcc0-e178-4b5b-b71e-09bf6c6aefae&w=96&q=75){kind=small}
