Writing Emails Your CEO Will Actually Read: The Bullet Method
My CEO reads email on his phone, between meetings, usually while walking. If my update takes more than fifteen seconds to scan, it does not get read — it gets skimmed, half-understood, and answered with a question I already answered in paragraph three.
It took me an embarrassing number of long, careful, ignored emails to learn this. The fix was not writing better paragraphs. It was giving up paragraphs entirely for a format I now call the bullet method. It works for CEOs, and honestly for any busy manager.
The rules
- Bullets, not prose. Every point is one bullet.
- Five words per bullet if you can, ten at the most. This sounds extreme. It is the whole method. Cutting a bullet from fifteen words to five forces you to find the actual point.
- Status first, context last. The thing they care about goes in bullet one, not after the background.
- One question maximum, clearly marked. If you need a decision, isolate it. Two questions in one email usually gets one answer.
- You own the actions, they own the decisions. Every action bullet starts with what you will do. Every decision bullet ends with what you need from them.
A real before and after
Here is the shape of an email I would have sent two years ago:
And here is the same email in the bullet method:
Same information. The first version takes a minute to read and buries the question. The second takes ten seconds and the question is impossible to miss. The reply I get to the second version is usually one word, which is exactly what I need.
Where AI fits in
The hard part of the bullet method is compression, and compression is something AI is genuinely good at — if you constrain it properly. My saved prompt:
I write my messy first draft at full length — that part is fast — and let the AI do the cutting. Then I check every bullet, because compression can change meaning, and a five-word bullet that says the wrong thing is worse than a long paragraph that says the right one.
When not to use it
The bullet method is for updates, status reports, and decision requests. It is not for everything. Condolences, apologies, performance conversations, anything where the human tone is the message — those get real sentences, written slowly. Part of judgement in admin work is knowing which kind of email you are writing before you start.
Start with your next update
Take the next status email you are about to send, and before sending, rewrite every sentence as a bullet of ten words or fewer. Move the status to the top. Isolate the question. You will feel like you are being blunt. You are not — you are being readable, and busy people remember who is readable.
If you find yourself doing this for many emails a day, I keep my most-used prompts saved — I wrote about my five most-used HR prompts here, and the sensitive-email one uses the same principles.