Stop Assuming People Read Your Emails

If you’ve already noticed the irony of reading a post titled Stop Assuming People Read Your Emails, congratulations. You are likely:

• an overachiever

• someone who checks their inbox voluntarily

• the exact person this post is for

Today’s topic is communication, a subject humanity has famously never mastered, despite thousands of years of practice and several billion chat messages. You might be expecting this post to end with a beautiful, laminated, 10-page communication plan. Spoiler alert: It will not.

In fact (whispers), despite certifications and years of experience, I have almost never seen a communication plan actually used. I’ve seen them written. I’ve seen them approved. I’ve seen them quickly abandoned like a New Year’s Resolution in late March.

Across industry and academia, I can count on one hand the number of communication plans that were ever revisited after kickoff. Why? Because PMs assume we are the good communicators. We herd cats. We translate jargon. We live by “If it wasn’t written down, it didn’t happen.” We worship Inbox Zero and feel morally superior when we achieve it.

We also assume everyone else is doing the same. They are not. Because PMs don’t work with other PMs all day. They work with Jim “345 Unread Emails” Smith, Samantha “Skims for Bolded Words” Johnson, and a PI responding from an airport lounge at 5:12 a.m. That carefully crafted email, bolded, underlined, highlighted, was opened on a phone, skimmed between flights, and mentally filed under I’ll come back to this.

Which is how you end up reading this dreaded message two days after a deadline passed: “Sorry, quick question- what day is this due again?”

So what’s missing from all the communication advice out there?

1. Repetition

   I know. I’m sorry. Repetition is the least glamorous communication skill and also the one that works best. Despite everyone nodding along in your last meeting, and despite you directly asking, “any questions?” with a dramatic pause, what actually happened was:

   - three people were multitasking

   - one checked a text from their kid’s school right during the key update

   - two others were experiencing a Pavlovian response to leftover lab meeting pizza being carted past them 

   Everyone nodded. Everyone agreed. And nothing was absorbed. 

   Repetition is how humans learn. Just like learning a language, information sticks because it’s encountered more than once, in more than one way. Repetition does not mean repeating yourself endlessly or resending the same email three times hoping someone accidentally clicks on it as their inbox refreshes.

   Repetition means reinforcing key information intentionally, across places people already look.

   Which leads to the next point:

2. The best communication tool is the one your team already uses

   The best communication tool is not the most elegant one. It’s not the one with the prettiest formatting. It’s not the one you personally prefer. It’s the one your team actually checks.

   If your team lives in Slack, your carefully formatted email is as decorative as a “Live, Laugh, Love” sign at your local DMV. And if someone who makes twice your salary proudly declares they “don’t do apps,” your digital communication might as well be interpretive art.

   Which leads us to the obvious but mostly avoided task: ask people how they prefer to receive important updates.

   Sometimes, ten perfectly worded messages across multiple platforms could have been a five-minute phone call to the one person who actually needed the information. If you’re a millennial like me, “hopping on a quick call” might elicit a fight-or-flight response typically reserved for bears and unknown phone numbers, but it’s still one of the fastest ways to unblock a project.

   This isn’t about lowering standards or over-accommodating. It’s about reducing misunderstandings.

   Which brings us to the part that makes optimizers THE MOST uncomfortable:

3. You will probably need more than one communication channel

I know how inefficient this feels. We want one system. One workflow. One source of truth to rule them all. We want everyone to adapt to it and live happily ever after. And sometimes they do, but a lot of the time they don’t. Your project suffering because someone missed an update is far more expensive than reinforcing that update in another channel.

If a project keeps getting stuck because someone never marks something as “Approved”, after it’s been moved to “Ready for Review”, that’s not a personality flaw. It’s a signal. Is it possibly a personality flaw? Sure, but in the workplace we politely call it a communication issue and move on. Instead, you could:

• Ask what would help them see it

• Adjust how the information reaches them

• Reinforce the change (more than once) until it sticks

Yes. Repetition. Again.

This may feel like it’s making your work less efficient, but compare:

• 10 extra minutes per week, reinforcing key updates

to:

• A 45-minute meeting recapping workflows

• Plus the time lost from stalled work

• Plus the emotional damage of having to explain your own email again, while screen-sharing said email.

Communication that sticks saves time. It just doesn’t always look efficient on paper.

The Point

This post isn’t an argument against documentation or communication plans. Those still matter. They protect your project and create institutional memory. This is a reminder that communication systems don’t work unless they work for humans. Distracted, multitasking humans who ignore your emails with the same confidence they ignore the Duolingo owl’s thinly veiled threats.

1. Repeat the important things.

2. Use the channels people already use.

3. Assume one message is never enough.

Your project will move faster.
Your inbox will be calmer.
And you’ll spend far less time saying, “I already sent an email about that earlier…”

How to implement this in practice

Before assuming your message landed, check:

• Was the key point repeated in more than one place?
  (Meeting + follow-up note, Slack + agenda, email + decision log, etc.)

• Was it communicated in the channel people actually use?
  Not your favorite tool. Theirs.

• Was the “what changed” explicit?
  If someone skimmed, could they still tell what was new?

• Was there a clear action or decision attached?
  “For awareness” is where information goes to die.

• Did the right people see it, not just everyone?
  Broadcasts don’t replace targeted nudges.

• Was it reinforced later (briefly)?
  A reminder isn’t nagging. It’s how humans learn.

If you can’t check at least four of these boxes, assume the message did not stick. No matter how many times you prompted ChatGPT to “make it sound better”.

Determine where repetition actually lives (without creating more work):

One of the biggest misconceptions about repetition is that it means more communication.

It doesn’t. It means strategic reuse of the same information, anchored in places people already expect to find it.

To help you implement this in practice use:

• Meeting agendas
  Reiterate decisions from the last meeting before moving forward.

• Decision logs
  This is where repetition pays dividends.
  The same decision should appear:

  • In the meeting recap

  • In the decision log

  • In whatever tool tracks downstream work

• Weekly updates
  Not new information but reinforcement of what matters most right now.

• Status changes
  If something moves from “in review” to “approved,” that change should surface more than once.

The goal is memory support not redundancy.

If you’re missing any of the artifacts above, we’ve shared simple templates on our Insights & Resources page, built specifically to support this kind of lightweight repetition.