Information Efficiency

Every piece of communication – an issue, a message, a meeting note – costs someone else's time and attention to read. Write so that cost is as small as possible for the value delivered. In practice:

• Front-load the key point rather than building up to it.
• Say the same thing in fewer words rather than more, unless the extra words are doing real work.
• Structure so a reader can skim and still get the gist – headings, bold, short bullets over dense paragraphs.
• Don't make someone read the whole thread to find out what actually happened – see Issues on keeping state, not just flow, up to date. This is also why Issues need all the key information written into them directly, rather than scattered across comments someone has to piece together.