Prefer Numbered Lists to Bullets
When communicating in writing (especially asynchronously), I suggest preferring numbered lists to bullets because numbered lists give others an easy way to reference your specific points.
To make my communication more efficient, I first batch up what I need to say or ask. Then I break it down into separate, addressable points. For example, if I’m getting started on a project, I might read the requirements and come up with a list of questions for the project manager.
Me:
- What if <insert edge case> happens?
- How urgent is this project?
- Do we need legal department approval?
Project manager:
- I hadn’t thought about that. If it happens, how about we <insert manual workaround>?
- The CEO wants this ASAP.
- They already did.
Me:
- Yeah, that works. We can automate it later.
- Okay, should we stop working on project A or project B so that we have bandwidth to pick this up?
Project manager:
- Let’s stop B.
Because of the numbering, it’s easier to maintain multiple conversations. Numbers create lightweight threads that are easy to follow, even if there are many more points than in this contrived example, and even if the back and forth involves more than just short sentences.
When people use bullets instead, I’ve seen others respond by copying the entire message and then replying inline with a different color or bolding the responses. This seems to be a common pattern in email (as opposed to something like Slack). I don’t think that’s a bad approach, but numbering things is easier and can be enough for many conversations.
One objection could be that there is a semantic difference between numbered lists and bulleted lists. Numbered lists imply that the order is important, which might not be the case. My response is that:
- This is about effective communication between humans, who are generally smart enough to understand when order is important.
- The writer can always be specific that order is or is not important if the distinction matters.
- If I used bullets here, and you wanted to argue that my second point is unconvincing, you would effectively be converting a bulleted list into a numbered one for convenience, which is exactly what I am saying we should be doing.