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 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.