The Long Document
You didn't reply. You wrote eleven pages instead.
Nothing leaves your hands until you would defend every line of it
You think by typing, and you want the decision to exist somewhere
Hand it to you and it comes back done, with nobody chased along the way
Who you are
You think by writing, you hold a high standard, and you'd rather work it out alone than talk it through. What comes out is thorough — the considered options, the tradeoffs, the reasoning — and it is usually the most complete thing anyone on the team has produced about that subject.
Six months later, when nobody remembers why the decision was made, your document is the only place the answer exists. That has saved teams from re-arguing the same thing three times, and it is almost always undervalued while you're writing it.
The difficulty is the read cost. A thorough document asks for forty minutes of someone's attention, and a busy person gives it four. So the work is right and the recommendation is buried on page seven, which means the thoroughness that made it good is also what stopped it from landing.
Put the recommendation in the first three lines. The rest is for whoever wants it.
You know it's you when…
- Your document was the only record of why something was decided
- The recommendation was on page seven and nobody got there
- You wrote it out instead of replying, and it was better
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