A client writes you four paragraphs about the March job. The third one holds the sentence that will cost you most of a Thursday: could you get the revised schedule over before the board meets on the twelfth. It looks like every other sentence in the message. It landed at 7:40 on a Tuesday morning along with everything else. From that moment you owe somebody something, read or unread.
This series is about loops like that one, and the work of closing them. Every chapter after this one rests on the first move, so this chapter stays there: what happens between a sentence landing in your mail and a piece of work existing with your name on it.
- An ask becomes a task when you decide it does. That decision is yours, and you have three moves.
- The clock starts when they send it. For some asks that’s a rule with a number in it.
- A loop has a small set of endings, and every one of them is something somebody does. Silence is not on the list.
- Four things go down at the start: what, when, which way the obligation points, and what would count as finished.
A request, and the ways it can end
The clearest description of an ask comes from before email was the problem. Terry Winograd at Stanford set it out in A language/action perspective on the design of cooperative work, presented at the 1986 ACM conference on computer-supported cooperative work. He called it a conversation for action. It’s worth having in front of you, because it names the parts your inbox keeps losing.
It starts the way your Tuesday morning starts. “In a simple conversation for action, one party (A) makes a request to another (B). The request is interpreted by each party as having certain conditions of satisfaction, which characterize a future course of actions by B.”
Conditions of satisfaction is the phrase to keep. It’s a separate thing from the deadline, and a separate thing from the subject. It’s what would have to be true for the asker to consider the thing done. Both of you carry a version of it from the moment the message is sent.
What happens next is short. “After the initial utterance (the request), B can accept (and thereby commit to satisfy the conditions); reject (and thereby end the conversation); or counter-offer with alternative conditions.” A counter-offer puts the other person back where you were, free to accept, reject or counter again. In the ordinary run of things you eventually assert that the conditions have been met. The person who asked declares that they’re satisfied. Only then is it over. Either of you can withdraw at any point, which ends it a different way and still ends it.
Winograd is careful about what the model is for. The diagram, he writes, “is not a model of the mental state of a speaker or hearer, but shows the conversation as a ‘dance,’ in which the acts generate the structure of completion of the conversation.” He was describing hospital wards and design offices in 1986, a long way from a four-person practice with a Gmail account. Take the structure and leave the vocabulary.
The structure is the useful part. Here’s what it tells you about your own week. Every ending is an act. Somebody accepts, somebody declines, somebody says it’s done, somebody agrees that it is. Time passed is missing from that list. An ask that’s been quiet since March is still open, and both of you are still standing in it, usually with different beliefs about whose move it is.
That’s the whole subject of this series in one sentence, and it splits straight into the two cases the later chapters take up. When the next act is yours, you have a task. When the next act is theirs, you have a wait, and a wait behaves differently enough that unanswered email gets its own treatment. One message routinely opens both at once: send me the March figures and I’ll approve the invoice.
The clock that started before you opened it
For most of what people ask you, the deadline is somebody’s patience, and it lives in their head rather than on paper. For a smaller set, a rule sets it, and the rule counts from the request rather than from the moment you got to it. That’s worth ten minutes of your attention once, because it changes what the gap between arrival and noticing costs you.
Two examples, both governing American practitioners.
The first sets a standard rather than a number. Treasury Department Circular No. 230 reproduces Title 31 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 10. Section 10.20(a)(1) provides that “a practitioner must, on a proper and lawful request by a duly authorized officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service, promptly submit records or information in any matter before the Internal Revenue Service unless the practitioner believes in good faith and on reasonable grounds that the records or information are privileged.” Four sections later, section 10.23 is a single sentence: “A practitioner may not unreasonably delay the prompt disposition of any matter before the Internal Revenue Service.” Both places leave promptly undefined. So the reasonableness of the delay gets judged after the fact, by somebody who was having a different week from yours.
The second carries a number, and it comes from your state board rather than from Washington, D.C. In Washington State, WAC 4-30-053 says that “when a licensee is required to return or make records available, a licensee should comply as soon as practicable but, absent extenuating circumstances, no later than 45 days after the request is made.” That 45-day figure follows the AICPA’s revised Records Requests interpretation, ET section 1.400.200, effective July 31, 2021. A good many boards track it, and some set their own. Arkansas gives you considerably less. Its Code of Conduct Rule 302 says a licensee “shall return client provided records to a client within a reasonable time after the client or former client has made a request for those records,” and that “a reasonable time shall not exceed 10 business days.” So the number that applies to you is your own board’s. Finding out which one it is takes about five minutes, and it’s worth doing before you need it.
The point underneath both is the same, and it holds for consultants with no board at all. The clock hangs on the request. Four days sitting unread in a chain about something else are four days spent. Your defense is that the ask gets found near the time it lands, rather than near the time you happen to scroll past it. Where a due date comes from when the sender leaves it open is a separate question with three honest answers, and email task management, without writing it down works through them.
Being asked is not the same as agreeing
Here’s the move that decides what you’re actually on the hook for, and most systems let it go past.
You read the client’s message and you write back: happy to, I’ll have it over to you Monday. That one line does three things. You’ve accepted. You’ve narrowed the conditions from before the board meets on the twelfth to Monday. And you’ve created a second obligation that now outranks the first. If Monday comes and goes, the sentence you failed is your own.
That sentence is sitting in your sent mail, filed under the day you wrote it. Software that reads only the incoming side captures the client’s version of the ask, which is the weaker one, and leaves yours in the sent folder. Three weeks later you’ll do the same, when you go back through the thread to work out what you promised.
The other two moves are worth naming, because they usually get made halfway.
Declining is an ending. I can’t take that on before the fifteenth closes the loop as completely as delivering would, and it closes it early, while the other person still has room to do something else. It feels colder than going quiet, which is why it goes unsaid. It’s the warmer of the two.
Counter-offering is the move you’re usually making anyway. I can do Thursday, or Monday if you need it checked properly. It puts the decision back where it belongs. It also restates the conditions of satisfaction in your own words, which is the closest thing to a written specification either of you will ever get.
Whichever of the three you’re making, make it in the thread rather than in your head. The thread is the one record you and the other person can both see. It’s also what separates a loop that’s open from a loop that merely feels open, and the two produce very different Fridays.
The ask that arrived in a room
Some asks land on you and four other people at once. Those behave differently, in a way somebody has measured.
Greg Barron and Eldad Yechiam published Private e-mail requests and the diffusion of responsibility in Computers in Human Behavior in September 2002. Email requests for help addressed to a single recipient drew more responses than the same requests sent to five. The responses to the single recipient were more helpful and longer as well. They read it as the diffusion of responsibility familiar from face-to-face research, showing up in a mailbox.
That’s a study of how strangers answer a request for information, a long way from how a firm handles a client, and it’s old enough that the mail clients in it have all been replaced. Take the direction from it and leave the size. An ask addressed to a room is a weaker ask than the same words addressed to one person. It’s weaker in exactly the way that matters here: by itself, it becomes nobody’s task.
For a two-person firm the room is two people, and two people is still a room. That particular failure has its own page in when an email falls through the cracks between you. What’s worth adding at this end is smaller. A copied-in ask becomes yours the moment you say so, and the thread is where saying so counts. I’ll take the schedule, Priya has the valuation. Two clauses, and the loop now has an owner and a witness.
Four asks that should stay off your list
Capturing everything anybody ever said is its own failure, and a quiet one. The list still looks healthy while you stop reading it. Four kinds are worth turning away at the door.
The pleasantry. Any thoughts welcome. Give me a shout if it would help to talk it through. Roughly half of them mean something. The other half are a way of ending a paragraph. The sentence itself reads the same either way.
The ask pointed at somebody else. You’re copied on a thread where the verb belongs to the person in the To line. Lifting it out puts somebody else’s work on your list. Now you’re half-tracking their job, and they can feel it.
The ask already answered further down. Somebody asks in the second message of a chain and gets what they wanted in the fifth. If you’re reading the chain on Friday, the ask is a matter of record and the work is behind you.
The conditional. If the surveyor comes back with revisions, can you turn them around inside a week. The obligation waits on the surveyor. This one is a watch: a standing condition that produces a task if and when it fires. Keeping the two apart matters, because a conditional filed as a task sits there going stale, and one filed nowhere is simply forgotten. Saying what you want watched for, in a sentence, is covered in setting your first watch in plain words.
All four cost you later, and in bulk. Ten items you could have skipped make the two that matter harder to see, which is the last chapter of this series, one alert instead of ten.
What has to be written down for a loop to close
Four things, and most lists hold the first two.
Which way it points. Toward you, and it’s work. Toward them, and it’s a wait. A message often opens one of each, and the two want different handling from the first minute. The one pointing at you needs a date. The one pointing at them needs a day on which its silence starts to mean something.
When. From the message, from the thread around it, or from you. That last one is the subject of a neighboring guide.
What would count as done. Winograd’s conditions of satisfaction, and the item that stays in everybody’s head. Send the schedule and send the schedule in a form the board can approve without a call are the same task until the Thursday they come apart. A task that carried no conditions can be marked complete. Closing it takes the other person’s agreement, and they were working from their own version all along.
The words it came from. Every row on a list is a paragraph squeezed down, and what gets squeezed out is whatever seemed obvious to whoever wrote the row. Keep the sentence attached, and an ambiguous row stays recoverable.
Write down the first two and you get a list that tells you what to do next. Write down all four and you get a list that can be finished.
Why nobody will label their own asks
The obvious fix is to make the sender do the work. Have people mark a message as a request, name what would satisfy it, give it a date. It’s been tried, at scale, and the argument against it is the best-known objection in this whole field.
The Coordinator, built on the model above, asked its users to classify their own utterances before sending them. Lucy Suchman set out what that costs in Do categories have politics?, published in Computer Supported Cooperative Work in 1993: “the adoption of speech act theory as a foundation for system design carries with it an agenda of discipline and control over organization members’ actions.” Categories that look like clarity from the top of an organization look like surveillance from inside it, and people route around them.
Whatever you make of the argument, the practical finding held. Your clients write four paragraphs at 7:40 in the morning and put the ask in the third one. That’s what they’ll keep doing, and any arrangement that asks them for a form fails in its first week.
So the reading happens at your end, after the message arrives, out of ordinary sentences written for a person to read. That’s a language problem with a real and measured error rate, and email task management, without writing it down sets it out with the numbers.
How Point handles an ask as it lands
In Point, the reading happens where the mail already is. Point is the mail client, rather than something bolted onto one. When a message asks something of you, that ask is lifted out as a dated task on your list, with the conversation still attached. A row that reads ambiguously is one tap from the sentence that produced it. You type none of it.
Both directions are held. Work you’ve handed to somebody else is tracked as a thing you’re waiting on, and you’re reminded to chase while chasing still helps. Conditionals go in as watches. Say in plain words what you want to be told about, and you’re told when it happens, instead of every time you wonder.
Everything lands on one list, covering every conversation and every business you run. That matters more than it sounds, because a second list is a reconciliation job you’ve quietly given yourself.
How far Point goes alone is set per kind of action. At the lowest setting Point suggests and stops there. In the middle, Point gets something ready and leaves it for you to look at. At the top, Point gets on with it. Every kind of action starts in the middle, so raising one is a decision you make rather than a default you inherit. Point’s work is written down in order, in ordinary sentences, and undoing something begins at the entry that recorded it. Everything else Point does is set out on the benefits page.
The half of it you have just made
Say the schedule goes out on the Monday, in the form the board can approve, with the covering line that says what changed. The task closes. You’ve done your part of the dance, and it was the part you control.
Now look at what you’re actually holding. In the same message, you asked whether the March invoice can go out at the same time. That one is a wait. There’s nothing to do, nothing to date, nothing to tick. It exists as an outgoing message shelved under the morning you typed it, plus a small fact you’re now carrying: the client owes you an answer and doesn’t know it.
Every ask you accept produces one of these on the way past, and these are the ones that go quiet. That’s the next chapter.