666: Get People Reading What You’re Sending, with Todd Rogers

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
You probably only skimmed that email I spent an hour writing, and let’s be equally honest the other way. I only skimmed the document your team worked on most of last week. This is the reality of how we all read in a busy world. In this episode, how to write so that people actually read what you send. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 666. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:30]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Of course, one of the key skills that we all need to, if not master, at least get better at as leaders, is the ability to get people reading, paying attention to the messages that we send. Those messages are sometimes purple, of course, sometimes in video, but oftentimes, many of our communications, in fact, the vast majority of mine every day, are in writing. And even though a lot of us don’t think of ourselves as writers, The reality is we spend a lot of our time writing and communicating through that medium every single day. It is a key competency for us to get better at as leaders, and I’m so glad today to welcome a guest who’s an expert at this, is gonna help us to do a better job of thinking of how we can actually get people paying attention to the things that we send. I’m so pleased to introduce Todd Rogers.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:39]:
He’s a professor of public policy at Harvard University where he’s won teaching awards for the past 7 consecutive years. He is a behavioral scientist and the cofounder of the Analyst Institute and Everyday Labs. His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, and many other outlets. He’s coauthor with Jessica Lasky-Fink of Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World. Todd, what a pleasure to have you.

Todd Rogers [00:02:08]:
Thanks, Dave. Very excited to talk about this work with you.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:11]:
I think most people in leadership roles don’t think of themselves as writers, and I think about this identity of being a writer myself, and I actually have writing as a key component of my job, and I often don’t even think about myself as a writer. When people say to you, they see your book, they know a bit about your work, and they say, well, that’s great, but I’m not a writer- How do you respond to them?

Todd Rogers [00:02:37]:
I think that you’ve got the right intuition in that, well, it doesn’t take much reflection to realize that we all write, whether it’s text messages, or emails, or whether we write proposals or pitches or memos to our teams. We write in lots of different capacities, both professionally and personally, and we probably write more words today than humans have ever written before. So I think- and Jessica and I say this explicitly in the book that we’re all writers whether we think we are or not.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:08]:
You write, in the book, “proper grammar and punctuation, full sentences, and appropriate word choice are almost always useful. But if you email your company’s leadership team a 5 paragraph essay about how a client meeting went, they’re unlikely to read it no matter how beautiful the prose. These dueling styles, formal writing, and practical writing coexist uncomfortably in our heads, and most of us have never been trained on how to combine them into effective writing.” You know, I think about those 2 distinctions. Of course, so many of us learn formal writing in school, but we haven’t had a lot of instruction, most of us, on practical writing. What’s the distinction between them, and how is it that they play together?

Todd Rogers [00:03:49]:
We are all taught how to write well, and that’s the first part of what you just read. We’re taught in k 12 and in college, and then we get feedback about how to write beautiful sentences that flow into paragraphs and that flow into some kind of argument. We are never taught how to write effectively. And by effectively, I and Jessica mean specifically successfully writing in a way that helps us achieve our goals. We write with a purpose. How do we successfully transfer the information or successfully elicit a response from the reader With what we write? And it really does start with how do people read because we should write in a way that accommodates the way that they actually read.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:36]:
And speaking of how we read, there’s a 4 word quote that I highlighted in the book, and it says, “spoiler alert, everybody skims.” It’s just the reality of how we approach reading almost anything, isn’t it?

Todd Rogers [00:04:49]:
Right. I mean, people are busy. Everybody has Something else that what usually, when they’re reading what we write, their goal, though it may be discouraging or even demoralizing for us as writers, Their goal is to move on as quickly as possible from the thing that we put in front of their face. And so given that, that means they are jumping around darting, trying to aggressively move on. And often that means moving on without understanding what we said because the time runs out, or they say they’ll do it later, or they think they pulled the gist out, but they didn’t really. And so the idea is everybody’s busy, everybody’s skimming. And this is true even for text messages. I teach in my class, I teach this at lots of organizations, governments, military.

Todd Rogers [00:05:33]:
Like, I I train this stuff all the time now, and it always starts with, like, raise your hand if you’ve ever sent or received a text message and looked at it and said, I can’t deal with that right now. Even with text messages, everybody’s hand goes up. Right? Which is like everybody’s trying, everybody’s busy, everybody’s got a lot to do, and they’re all skimming. And so our goal as writers, the requirement for us as writers is to write in a way that makes it easy for our readers because that helps us achieve our goals, and it’s kinder to our readers.

Dave Stachowiak [00:06:02]:
One of the studies in the book sites that people report skimming 40% of emails. And I think about that and what you just said of the experience we all have. We get into our inbox of, like, alright. I wanna process what’s in my inbox as fast as I possibly can so I could get on to the other things that I really need to be doing. Right? And yet, it’s so interesting how, at least for me, there’s a disconnect between I think we all can appreciate that experience of wanting to get through things quickly, not wanting to spend a lot of time in emails, skimming text messages. But then when we’re on the other side, it’s like we forget all that. Like, we start composing these long emails. We think people read every single word.

Dave Stachowiak [00:06:46]:
We’re really careful on our punctuation and our grammar and putting all the details in there. It’s really fascinating. There’s such a disconnect there, isn’t there?

Todd Rogers [00:06:53]:
Yeah. There’s this perspective taking error, which is like, well, this is the most important thing to me right now, so it will probably be the most important thing to you when you read it. Yeah. I don’t know how much your audience likes these social psychology experiments that are hilarious, but one of my favorites is this dissertation by Elizabeth Newton where she asks half the people to come in and tap a song that is widely known, and sometimes it’s like happy birthday or the wheel’s on the bus, and you tap it on the table, and you predict what percent of listeners will be able to figure out what song you’re tapping. And you’re invariably, it’s like 90% of listeners will be able to understand my song, and then they then play your song for other people, it’s less than 2%.

Dave Stachowiak [00:07:44]:
Mhmm.

Todd Rogers [00:07:43]:
And we just are really not awesome at at imagining ourselves on the other side. And in the case of writing, as you’re noting, when we’re writing it, it’s important to us. So we mistakenly think they’ll probably read it as carefully as we’re writing it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:07:56]:
I find myself of making this error all the time, and we may talk about some of the examples where I’ve errored. But this book is really brilliant at helping us to, like, get on that other side and take that perspective. And one of the key principles that you talk about in the book, in fact, it’s the first principle, is that less is more. And one of the key invitations you make is to use fewer words. And I’m quoting Jessica and you now. You say, “in one study, we sent 2 versions of an email to 7,000 school board members across the US requesting they complete a short online survey. 1 email was a 127 words. The other was 49 words. The concise email yielded nearly twice as many survey responses as the word email, a 4.8% response rate instead of 2.7% response.”

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:47]:
It’s there’s example after example of studies in the book of how significant is just cutting down the number of words makes as far as how people engage.

Todd Rogers [00:08:58]:
Yes. There’s a second half to that study that I think we talk about later, and this is a consistent pattern also. We have never found that fewer words is is worse when it comes to eliciting a response or helping people getting your readers to actually read. But the interesting second half is that consistently, people don’t have that intuition. When they read both, they either think they’ll perform equally or they think the longer one will be more effective. Read meaning, like, we get someone who’s unrelated, not the writer, not the recipient, to read both carefully. We are prompting you to read both. And now tell me which one’s gonna be more effective.

Todd Rogers [00:09:38]:
And very often, they think the longer one will be more effective because it’s more respectful. It’s more detailed. It’s more content. It’s more, it conveys more information, but that that intuition is wrong because they’re not putting themselves in the perspective of the reader whose goal very often is to move on as quickly as possible.

Dave Stachowiak [00:09:57]:
Yeah. And knowing how bad our intuition tends to be on this, especially when we’re the one who’s sending the message, what do you find is helpful for people who actually get beyond kind of like the, okay, I understand this, like theoretically, but actually start taking information out. And I know you work with a lot of organizations like help people get messages to be more concise. What actually works to start doing that in practice?

Todd Rogers [00:10:22]:
So a good exercise that is kinda fun, and we did Jessica and I did this study that, we report in the book where we We’re working with a a big organization that communicates with journalists, 50,000 journalists to give them information every week to help their reporting. And they it is they are writers, the people running the organization and writing their newsletter and reports. So they’re excellent writers. They’re experienced professional writers. And they approached us and, like, hey. We’re done with our latest report and newsletter. Which what experiment would you like to run? And I said, with 30 minutes you just spent probably 20 hours or 10 hours writing this thing. With 30 minutes, cut it in half in your own writing.

Todd Rogers [00:11:05]:
So as well as you can. So, like, just the exercise of cutting 50% of the words. When they were running an experiment with your 50,000 people, and so they did. They gave they were 30 minutes, they cut it in half, and then we had a version original and then a version concise. And we did the experiment, and the concise led to twice as many journalists using the content they developed.

Dave Stachowiak [00:11:26]:
Oh, wow.

Todd Rogers [00:11:26]:
And so, like, the idea I just if you ask, like, how do we do it? I think it’s a productive exercise to actually just see if you can cut it in half. And then afterwards, once you’ve done the work, look at them. And if you can test them, test them. But if not, I’m gonna say please vote for the shorter one.

Dave Stachowiak [00:11:41]:
Alright. So funny you mentioned this because I sort of did my own little mini study this week unintentionally. I had a interview earlier this week, and I sent a email to the guest the day before. And, we got on the line and she said, oh, I know you sent me an email. I skimmed it, but I can’t, remind me what you know, it was like one of those things, and and by the way, I hear that a lot. That’s not an uncommon thing. And And then I was emailing you yesterday talking about our conversation on less is more, and I thought, Well, it’d be pretty ironic if I sent you a long email. Right? So I pulled up the email after I had written it, and I said, I’m gonna take 2 minutes and see if I can make this email way more concise than it normally is.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:32]:
And I went back and looked, and the email I sent to the other guest was, let’s see, 293 words. The email I sent to you was a 161 words, so I cut out almost half of what I normally send. And you replied right away and you referenced I know you read the whole email too because you reference something I said in the very last line of the message. And I just granted, it’s a study of 2. Right? But I just thought, wow. Just in my own experience this week of, like, me stopping for a minute or 2 and pulling out 40, 50% of the words that I normally send made a huge difference in just how someone else responded to something I thought was important.

Todd Rogers [00:13:15]:
I see that I know that it is just 2 people in your experiment, but you can look you can look at my inbox to see that I have I am not a swift responder to most of the messages that are sitting in there. Yeah. That great. I I’m sorry that I caused that kind of angst for you. I know that I hear this a bunch, people are like, I I I sat on this message for a while because I wasn’t sure if you would judge me, and for anyone to communicate with me. I want let it officially be known.

Todd Rogers [00:13:49]:
I do not sit in judgment in my inbox. I I am going fast like everyone else, but I try to reserve judgment. It turns out communicating is hard.

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:57]:
Yeah. It is. It is. And that’s why I mean, there’s so much I mean, we’re just we’re just gonna be hitting a 1 piece of the book but there’s so much just in this less is more principle. Like, one is use fewer words. Right? Like, just starting. I mean, taking 30 seconds a minute. Not on every email, but, like, the ones that really matter, the message you’re sending to your board, the message you’re sending to your top client, the message you’re sending to a key stakeholder.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:23]:
Like, take 30 seconds or a minute to see can you make that more concise. And one of the other messages that I love in the book is include fewer ideas, which is different than including fewer words, and I’m really fascinated by, in fact, the most fascinating thing to me in this book is a study you mentioned of a fundraising email that you worked on that went out to in a political campaign. I think there were, like, 700,000 donors. And the original email that the campaign had put together was 6 paragraphs, and you and your team kinda looked at this, and I’m I I wonder if you could share, like, kind of that process of what happened.

Todd Rogers [00:15:05]:
Yeah. Good. I love this one. And and typically, and we can tell your listeners now, this is the single vivid example you will remember because it’s so funny. But I just wanna situate us. less is more is one of the 6 principles. And in it, there are 3 rules. 1 is fewer words, which anyone who’s read Strunk and White, the elements of style, It’s it’s just right on on on the team with omit needless words, they said. That’s cheap, easy, and you should do it.

Todd Rogers [00:15:35]:
Instead of saying, The reason for this is you could just say because, or in order to, you could just say to. It’s it’s faster For readers, it’s easier. It’s more likely they’ll respond. That’s cheap and easy.The harder one that requires more judgment as writers is not just omit needless words. It’s omit only kinda useful ideas. And it really requires, like, a deep internalizing that the more you add, the less likely someone is to read and respond. The optimal number of ideas or words is not one.

Todd Rogers [00:16:10]:
Right. So you know your context, you know your goals, and you have to try to achieve those within that context. But all that said, on the margin, every additional thing you add decreases the likelihood someone will read and respond. Mhmm.

Todd Rogers [00:16:24]:
So it’s just it’s just judgment calls. And so this experiment you described that is I I love, and I’m glad that you flagged this one. It’s with, we’ll just say, one of the big federal parties in the United States, The federal political parties in the United States. And I get a call one day, and they’re like, hey. We’ve got this fundraising email going out. What experiment would you like to run? And, again, maybe listeners will have the same experience. These are great calls and great emails to get because I always have little random Ideas that I’m like, try this. And these guys, we didn’t have enough time.

Todd Rogers [00:16:57]:
They said we have 5 minutes until we have to send this fundraising message out

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:01]:
Oh, wow.

Todd Rogers [00:17:02]:
To 700,000 donors to the party. And I’m like, okay. Well, what if you just arbitrarily delete every other paragraph. So every paragraph had some new factoid or idea about why you should donate to this party and why this election is so important. And so we’re just, like, arbitrarily delete every other one. So it’s it’s now at paragraph 1, 3, 5 remains, but paragraph 2, 4, and 6 are gone. And we have independent people read both, and they agree with my read, which is that it’s incoherent when we have deleted every other paragraph. Yeah.

Todd Rogers [00:17:37]:
So it used to flow as a 6 paragraph message. Now it’s this incoherent adjacency of paragraphs that are unrelated to each other. And we run the experiment with them, and still the shorter one that’s incoherent raises 16% more money for the party.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:53]:
It’s amazing.

Todd Rogers [00:17:55]:
It’s I mean, I was just I mean, the incoherence is what I think just so delicious out of that study.

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:01]:
Yeah. And the message here is not just randomly cut stuff. Right?. But the message is even in a situation where you had no time and the The tactic used was to randomly just pull things out. Even then, the response rate was better for getting donations for a political campaign. And I think it’s just fascinating getting back to this less is more. Like, imagine if you had had 20 minutes and you had spent time thinking about, like, okay, how could we make a 3 paragraph email really coherent and really have a clear call to action and make fewer requests, which we’re gonna get to in a moment too. It was just it’s just really profound.

Todd Rogers [00:18:42]:
Yeah. Thank you. I I do wanna, like we I we’re gonna walk this all back as this advances, right, because it doesn’t fit every context, and it doesn’t fit every sender, and it doesn’t fit every recipient. I am at a university, and our our dean will often send longish messages to everybody. And I will say generously that not everyone reads them closely because they’re very long. And I work with the dean’s communications office, and I’m like, hey. You know, we could probably start by just, like, cutting these things by 90%, and then you’d be more likely if someone read them. And then the dean’s office was was like, well, we have a lot of considerations other than just maximum readability.

Todd Rogers [00:19:25]:
There are a lot of political stakeholders who wanna see this paragraph in or this paragraph. There’s just different constituencies with different messages.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:33]:
Yeah.

Todd Rogers [00:19:32]:
Or with different sections. So we these we we could not think of them as ideas, each paragraph. But, like, they each section or paragraph speaks to different stakeholders, and so they can’t really. I was working with a someone who works in the CIA on intelligence assessments, and they were saying our intelligence assessments have to be 70 pages because, like, that’s just the norm. And if I were to write a 30 page intelligence assessment, my colleagues and my boss would think I didn’t do my job. And so there’s just like there’s constraints that make these things not viable writing less to make it easier to read. So there are other strategies that one could use in the each of these settings. So like for our dean, we made it so that the first the the message started with 1 paragraph of I’m writing to you with these updates with 4 updates.

Todd Rogers [00:20:19]:
Below, you will see them, a, b, and c. As always, let me know if you have questions with the dean and then a structured message that makes it easy to scam and everybody knows what it was about. Or the CIA intelligence assessments, they add headings and clear guideposts on how to navigate this document so that it make it easier for a busy reader to find what they need out of it. But the idea is when possible, less is more, but sometimes it’s not possible.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:47]:
Yeah. But there’s so much else you can I mean, I think I love the example of, okay, you’ve got a long communication that needs to go out? For whatever reason politically, it’s gonna be long. Start with the, hey. Here’s the 4 key things in this message. The the too long didn’t read the executive summary, whatever you wanna call it. Right? At the top I mean, I’m thinking about just my practice. I send out a lot of, I shouldn’t say a lot, but certainly some long things once in a while, and I could do a better job at doing some of that. You know what I mean? There’s just there’s almost always an opportunity to do that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:15]:
And, you know, I was thinking about speaking of just making ideas simpler, having fewer ideas, going from the email example you just gave that went to almost a 1000000 people, to the opposite side of, like, I’m sending a personal text message, and I love this message example you give in the book. And, in fact, I’m just gonna read it because we have all gotten text messages like this, and we have all sent text messages like this. So here’s the here’s the example. The text is, “I’m looking forward to our 6:30 dinner tonight. Let’s eat at Tina’s Italian Restaurant at 651 Ocean Drive. Their breadsticks are awesome. I had them this past spring. I haven’t had the lasagna, but I’m ready. It’s supposed to be tasty. Let’s meet at my place 15 minutes early, and we’ll walk from there. Sam and Joey are going to join us at the dinner too.”

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:58]:
And I’m reading that, I’m sort of laughing. Like, I know I’ve sent messages like that before. And you make the point in The book that when you think about this from fewer ideas, what does someone really need to know that it comes down to 2 sentences. You could have the text be, dinner is on. Meet at my place at 6:15.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:18]:
Done.

Todd Rogers [00:22:16]:
Yeah. And as a writer, you might have other goals that you and I may not bring to this. Like, maybe this person wants to know that Joey and whoever are gonna be at the at the meal, this may you know, they’re they’re lifelong enemies, and maybe they’ll they’ll wanna flake. Who knows? But, like, you you prioritize. And of those 8 ideas, you decide which are the most important and know that the more you add, the less likely the key info is gonna get through. That’s the problem. One of my favorite activities when I do these workshops with organizations is have a like, raise your hand if you ever went into a meeting and were astonished and asked everybody, didn’t you read the thing? Didn’t you read the thing? And everybody’s experienced that. And then turn it on Yyu.

Todd Rogers [00:23:04]:
Has anyone ever said to you, didn’t you read the thing? Yeah. Of course. I mean, like, it it’s like part of the the Comedy of organizational life is that no one has read the thing.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:16]:
Yeah. Yeah. And isn’t it, Jeff Bezos at Amazon when he was, CEO had this practice of like 2 page memos, like, when people come into meetings because just making peace with the reality that even amongst their executive team, no one was gonna read a 20 page brief, so the rule was it had to be 2 pages or less. And it just comes back down to this core human tendency of we’re not going to likely read something, at least not as much, or as consistently if it’s longer. And I think like as I think about this, especially including fewer ideas, like you said, it doesn’t mean that every message is literally 1 idea, but it’s just being conscious of the fact that the more ideas I put into this, the less likely that someone’s going to engage with it or look really pay attention to everything fully and just knowing that there’s a line there and just being conscious of that line.

Todd Rogers [00:24:06]:
Yeah. And this Amazon and Bezos example is a great one. There there’s another part of it That sort of deeply internalizes what we’re talking about, which is there is a word cap and a page cap for these memos before meetings. But the other part of it, I remember reading a book last year about it, and I thought it was brilliant. And it and it really internalizes we should write in a way that accommodates the way people read. And I don’t know if you remember, but all the discussion about how they write at Amazon, every meeting starts with 7 minutes of everyone reading in silence.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:43]:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Todd Rogers [00:24:45]:
Right? And the idea I’m not advocating for that. That’s its own cultural thing, and you can whatever. But it is a, like, really profound acceptance that, otherwise, these things are gonna be skimmed on the walk from 1 office to the next, and whereas this guarantees that they are read, and it guarantees that they are able to be read in 7 minutes.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:05]:
There’s another lens to look through this on in less is more. We talked about using fewer words, fewer ideas, But then the 3rd invitation is make fewer requests. And you write asking busy readers for more can cause them to do less. Tell me more about that.

Todd Rogers [00:25:25]:
Just like more ideas will leave you vulnerable to your reader not reading, not understanding, not responding. Asking for multiple things also has this tendency of leading people to not respond. And so the mechanism could be if you’re asking for 3 things, people may get deterred, and they’ll be like, I’ll deal with this later. They’ll procrastinate. Or they may deal with 1 of them and then get distracted. Or they may try to do one of them, get derailed, and life gets in the way. And so what we’ve seen in experiments, randomized experiments like the ones we’ve been talking about, where if you add additional requests, you decrease the likelihood that any one of them is gonna be responded to. And it’s got it lead to, like, 2 profound implications.

Todd Rogers [00:26:14]:
1, okay, we should do fewer we should ask for fewer things. But 2, it really, like all of writing, it can only be effective if we are clear on our own priorities. And so if we’re asking for 3 things, but only 1 of them is the most important. The other 2 need to need to be put aside. And I do this. I mean, I so you were talking earlier about your emailing of someone who is an interviewee on the pod. And then emailing with me. I I I write the 1st draft, and I’m like, hey.

Todd Rogers [00:26:45]:
You know, Dave, you it was fun talking to you. There were 4 things that you asked that I want to ask you about afterwards, and I’ll write my message. And then if if one of them is actually really important and stands out above all the rest. It’s not uncommon for me to just, like, completely rewrite it, get rid of the other 3. I’ll side pocket them. So, like, if you respond, I’ll dump the I’ll hit you with the next 3. But, really, I just want you I just wanna make sure the priority things get done.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:08]:
Is it as easy as drafting something and starting with counting up how many requests am I actually making of the other party and just thinking about, like, Okay. Do I need to make all those requests, or could I pull some of that out? Is that a starting point? And if not, what do you find tends to work?

Todd Rogers [00:27:30]:
So writing does 2 things, both of which are kinda magical, but they’re very different, and I think we often conflate them. The first, writing helps us clarify our own thinking, and that’s great. Like, 1st drafts look like that, and journaling looks like that. But something we are sending to someone else doesn’t need to be the process through which we clarified our own thinking. The second thing writing does-and and Jessica and I talk about this in the book- and with a little little comic strip, I think, is the magic of getting an idea from my head Into some kind of form, and then eventually, that idea in very close similarity ends up in your head. Like, truly incredible. But the process of effectively getting it from my head to your head is not the same thing as me clarifying my own thinking. So just because it took me 7 paragraphs figure out that what I’m really asking you is question x, I can then go through it and be like, okay.

Todd Rogers [00:28:24]:
If the goal was to ask you the question x, it’s a different project. And then I just write it differently. Mhmm. And so I just like, it’s worth thinking of them differently. And I think often, somehow, we either think people would like to know our thought process or how we got there, we don’t even think that there’s something different between our thought process and effectively communicating to you.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:42]:
There’s something so powerful about just getting it down in writing, whatever medium it is, text message, email, memo, it has a way of just starting that process, right, of like, okay, all this stuff came out. Now what do I if I can stop and actually just think about what’s really important here. It’s so funny you mentioned this too. I sent a email to a friend of mine week or 2 ago. And I knew I sort of knew I was breaking all the rules when I sent the email because I’d I wanted to follow-up with him on 7 or 8 things. And I should have sent them in separate messages, but I actually put in the topic line the subject line of the email, 8 random things unorganized and unrelated, but clearly, I’ve I just like I was leaned into the hilariousness of it. And I knew it was breaking the rules, and I was, like, sort of laughing about it in writing the message. And and then he wrote back and was like, oh, that’s really funny that you sent all this and unorganized thoughts and all that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:36]:
And then he still missed several of them, which is not his fault at all. It was like totally I even knew going into it. Okay. I’m making too many requests in 1 message with too many unrelated things, and it’s just the awareness of starting with that and then getting something down on paper and then thinking like, okay, what can I prioritize here if I’m willing to just stop and think about that for a moment? Again, not every message that we send, but The ones that especially are important going to key stakeholders that are gonna have more visibility, a little bit of time there makes a big difference.

Todd Rogers [00:30:09]:
Yeah. And this is again why goals matter. So I was working with people on a sales team, and they’re like, look. I I also wanna build a relationship with the recipient. And I my singular goal maybe right now is I wanna close this deal, but it’s a long term relationship, and I wanna build and maintain this relation, which means I wanna add a little personality, and you were being funny there. And so you just have to balance the competing goals. We are not robots maximally efficiently transferring information back and forth, we’re humans transferring information in the context of relationships and Trying to build relationships. And so like we were saying, like, there there’s no right answer.

Todd Rogers [00:30:51]:
There’s just trade offs. And one of the things that we’re really trying to drive home is that we should be acutely aware of the trade offs.

Todd Rogers [00:30:59]:
It is not costless to add more information.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:02]:
Yeah.

Todd Rogers [00:31:02]:
It is it is not costless. And we Pay the cost as writers in failing to achieve our goals as effectively as we could.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:11]:
You said the word robots a moment ago, and probably the elephant in the room that we haven’t about his AI because, of course, AI is changing a lot about how we think about creating content and what we do with it, and there’s so much we could say. One starting point though is you have actually set up a tool that’s specifically designed to help people get better at this. I’m wondering if you could tell us a bit about that, and how could folks engage with it if they wanna get better at this as one of many tools they might use?

Todd Rogers [00:31:41]:
Sure. AI is Well, let’s just talk about generative AI for now, the chat GPT kind of AI or Gemini or Bard or Anthropic. The power it’s not the only. The part of, like, power and revolution that they bring is that they’re so effective at generating content, and that’s actually the way you talked about it. We are talking about just to flip it, we are focused on how the human reads and writing in a way that accommodates and reflects the way they actually read. We, with some computer scientist colleagues here, we tuned GPT 4, which is OpenAI’s, as of the time of this recording, their most Advanced GPT, on the principles, the 6 principles and the 20 something rules on how do we write so busy readers are more likely to read and respond. And then we trained it on pre and post examples of email. So we actually developed a tool on our website that is really good at converting an email that a normal human writes into one that will actually be easy for a normal human to read using these principles.

Todd Rogers [00:32:46]:
It adds structure. It makes it skimmable, where possible, cuss words. And so it’s at our website, www.writingforbusyreaders.com. We should put in the show notes. But it’s awesome, and I I have no idea how many people use it this week, but we’re it is rapidly its usage is growing, and we’re really excited about it as a tool.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:05]:
sYeah. Well, I think it’s it means so much of I mean, we’re early days on AI, but clearly, it is gonna be a key tool that all of us utilize in our work. It’s not gonna replace what we do as humans, of course, at least in most cases, but it’s gonna be a tool we’re all gonna use. And what a great example of that. Like, I think it’s like a fascinating use of you’ve created this book done all the research with Jessica on, like, how to actually make messages better so people read them and then take an existing message, utilize the website to actually then make suggestions based on all the principles you’ve researched and practically change a message like super cool. So we’ll link to it and I hope folks will try it out just as a starting point for like whether you use it in practice just or not, just to get you a real practical look at, like, a message you might send. What would it look like putting it through these lenses and these rules? And if you do that, what a key place to start. I love it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:57]:
Todd Rogers is coauthor of Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World. Todd, thank you to you and Jessica for all your work. So appreciate it.

Todd Rogers [00:34:07]:
Yeah. I I I hope this is helpful, and I’m really grateful to get to share it with you. Thanks.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:18]:
If this conversation was helpful for you, a few related episodes I’d recommend one of the themes you may have heard in this conversation is thinking about influencing others. There’s an element here of sales and marketing. Right? Meeting people where they are and influencing them so they move forward and respond to the request you’re making. It’s one of the reasons Daniel Pink wrote a book called To Sell is Human. He made the point in that book that we all have an element of sales in our roles regardless of what part of the organization you work for, regardless if you’re in a for profit or a nonprofit or a government agency. There’s an element of sales we all need to be better at. That’s why I talked with him on episode 84. The surprising truth about influencing others goes very much in the spirit of this conversation and how to influence in a way that’s effective and serves the other party well.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:12]:
Also recommended episode 145, Improve Your Writing with Practical Typography. Matthew Butterick was my guest on that episode. We talked about his Book that’s available on the Internet with lots of great guidance on how to use words, fonts, Practices with grammar effectively, we didn’t talk about that much in this conversation. There’s so much there from Matthew in that conversation And that complements this well, episode 145 for that.And maybe you heard this conversation today and you said, hey. I’d actually like to work on being a better reader of what people send, but also of the books that I’m reading, and if that’s you, I’d recommend the episode with Sönke Ahrens on episode 564, make your reading more meaningful. We talked about his very popular book, How to Take Smart Notes: The Zettelkasten System that him and so many others have embraced and utilized, I use a version of that system for my own note taking. We talk in detail on how to really make reading more meaningful and to capture ideas well in episode 564.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:17]:
All of those episodes you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website. There is a topic area under the website called writing skills. So if you’re looking for all the conversations we’ve had in the past to help you to get better at your writing, I would recommend that as one of the areas inside of the free membership. And if you haven’t set up your free membership, go over to coachingforleaders.com right now. Set up your free membership. You’ll be able to search all of the past episodes by topic. And one of the other pieces of, key benefits rather inside the free membership is my interview and book notes. One of the things that I’m doing every week, speaking of being concise, is trying to find what are the 4 or 5 or 6 quotes or brief paragraphs from an author’s book when we’re featuring a book on the show that I think are the most important, the most critical for the conversation we’ve had.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:05]:
I’ve done that with Todd and Jessica’s book today and highlighted those. Those are all available in my book and interview notes for every episode where we feature it, so you can go and find under, book and interview notes inside the free membership. You can track down all of those, Key highlights, some of my key interview points, some things we don’t always get to on the show, all of those are part of the free membership, one of many the benefits go over to coachingforleaders.com for more.And in the spirit of writing, you’ve been hearing me talk about Coaching for Leaders Plus for a while, I have been writing over the last year monthly long form articles for our Plus members. And a few months ago, I sent out a survey to all our Plus members and said, how do I make this even better for you? And one of the themes I got back was right alignment with this conversation today is folks said, hey, this is working well. I’d like to hear from you more often fewer words, And so I’ve changed it up in Coaching for Leaders Plus and upgraded what I’m doing rather than sending long monthly long form articles just once a month. This year, I’ve actually migrated to short form weekly journal entries that are going to all of our Plus members, so folks are hearing from me more. If you’re a member of Plus, you’ve already been seen those messages from me in recent weeks.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:26]:
And if you haven’t yet checked out Coaching for Leaders Plus, it is a way for you to hear even more from me more often, now much more concise, my thoughts, my integration of what you’re hearing on the episodes that will help support you in your learning and meet you where you are right now. For more on all the details of Coaching for Leaders Plus, just go to coachingforleaders.plus. It’s one of the key benefits inside of us.Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I’m glad to welcome Stanford professor Bob Sutton to the show. We’re gonna be talking about the way to handle oblivious leadership. We’ve all dealt with that at some point.

Dave Stachowiak [00:39:08]:
Bob and I will be talking about what you can do tactically when you find yourself in that situation. Join me for that conversation with him next week, and I’ll see you back on Monday.