Most requests at work are worded backwards.
The ask comes first. The context, if it comes at all, comes after a question, then another question, then a meeting nobody needed.
Asking is cheap. Answering is expensive. It is almost like a puzzle: before your colleague can answer, they have to figure out what you’re actually asking. They recall context, infer the situation, sometimes scroll back through a week of Slack. The answer is the easy part. The reconstruction is the work.
The fix is mechanical, and it costs you almost nothing. You already have the context in your head.
Background → Situation → Ask → Invitation
- Background — what the reader needs to recall or know
- Situation — what’s happening now
- Ask — the actual request: a decision, input, or action
- Invitation — a genuine opening for pushback or alternatives
The same ask, before and after:
Without:
“Can you review my PR?”
With:
“PR #432 splits the auth service into its own module. I’d love to merge it before Thursday’s deploy. Could you please take a look? The bit that needs attention is the migration in
0042_session_keys.sql. Let me know if you don’t have capacity and I’ll grab someone else.”
A good ask is a one-shot answer waiting to happen. A bad ask is a thread of seven messages, hours of context switches, and a calendar invite.
Pick one.