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> The key to success is overcommunicating. No, "overcommunicating", by definition, means giving more information than what is needed. There are times and plac

> The key to success is overcommunicating. No, "overcommunicating", by definition, means giving more information than what is needed. There are times and places where overcommunicating works, but email is almost never one of them. You simply can't get away with more than a few sentences in an email unless the recipients are specifically expecting that from you. When "an essay" lands in someone's inbox unexpectedly, at best, you can expect recipients to skim it for whatever concerns them directly. If you have critical points or conditions embedded in a paragraph in the middle, those are probably going fly past the recipients' attention completely unnoticed.

_greim_ 6y ago
As a corollary, if your org is dependent on email for communication, you likely have some inefficiency and room for improvement.
- medium_burrito 6y ago
  In all seriousness, please enlighten me. Email isn't the best, but the other options are equally or more shit: Slack, which has nonfunctional search and is miserable to navigate? Github readmes? Atlassian's wiki, which has even more broken search, and follows management's whims? Google docs, which vary widely in format, is not easily searchable, and has no index? Team documentation, which follows managements whims, gets moved around, deprecated and eventually stowed in unused lavatories? Internal stackoverflow, which is piloted and then slowly abandoned after an intial big push my managers, who get promoted and then leave the company? Facebook workplace, which suffers a similar fate to stackoverflow? The problem is there is no global index or search- think Sourcegraph, and management keeps changing products/documentation/comms strategy every 6 months.
  - sqs 6y ago
    Quote: "The problem is there is no global index or search- think Sourcegraph, and management keeps changing products/documentation/comms strategy every 6 months." Are you saying that Sourcegraph's management keeps changing products/documentation/comms strategy every 6 months? (Just not sure how to parse this sentence.)
    - medium_burrito 6y ago
      No, I'm saying that management keeps changing internal documentation/comms strategy, and that without a central index to search, it's impossible to know where things are, or what's even going on. A tool like Sourcegraph but for finding documentation could be useful, but it doesn't show you the amount of "dead" documentation that's floating out there, or give you a way to browse everything.

_greim_ 6y ago

As a corollary, if your org is dependent on email for communication, you likely have some inefficiency and room for improvement.

medium_burrito 6y ago
In all seriousness, please enlighten me. Email isn't the best, but the other options are equally or more shit: Slack, which has nonfunctional search and is miserable to navigate? Github readmes? Atlassian's wiki, which has even more broken search, and follows management's whims? Google docs, which vary widely in format, is not easily searchable, and has no index? Team documentation, which follows managements whims, gets moved around, deprecated and eventually stowed in unused lavatories? Internal stackoverflow, which is piloted and then slowly abandoned after an intial big push my managers, who get promoted and then leave the company? Facebook workplace, which suffers a similar fate to stackoverflow? The problem is there is no global index or search- think Sourcegraph, and management keeps changing products/documentation/comms strategy every 6 months.
- sqs 6y ago
  Quote: "The problem is there is no global index or search- think Sourcegraph, and management keeps changing products/documentation/comms strategy every 6 months." Are you saying that Sourcegraph's management keeps changing products/documentation/comms strategy every 6 months? (Just not sure how to parse this sentence.)
  - medium_burrito 6y ago
    No, I'm saying that management keeps changing internal documentation/comms strategy, and that without a central index to search, it's impossible to know where things are, or what's even going on. A tool like Sourcegraph but for finding documentation could be useful, but it doesn't show you the amount of "dead" documentation that's floating out there, or give you a way to browse everything.