 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rossell here. I want to record a video today. It's just about an article that's out there on the internet. Nevertheless, I think that this is one of the most valuable and short guides to effective business communication I've ever come across. It's an article in the Harvard Business Review online by Cabr Segal, and it's entitled how to write email with military precision. A little bit of context. I used to work at a startup here in Israel, and a lot of people working in the Israeli startup ecosystem have military backgrounds, whether from a lot of people from military intelligence and other parts of the of the military. And the CTO, one of these companies, mentioned to me that the Israeli army used a system for writing emails that apparently they got from the Americans. So I've no reason to disbelieve that I wasn't in the Israeli army to confirm firsthand. But this is basically the system. There's a little bit about it online, and this is the first one that shows up. So the first thing is this, and this is something I've been using since and trying to advocate for in companies I've worked at. The first thing is to it's a system for starting your email with a keyword. So as the author points out here, the first thing your email recipient sees is your name and subject line. So assume these days that whoever you're sending an email to, it's probably going to be read on a smartphone, if not a smartphone, perhaps on a tablet. And then in a minority of cases nowadays, it's probably being read on laptop or a desktop like a proper email client. So therefore, if you are sending email to a busy recipient, and this goes for internal email as well, then it makes sense to prefix the subject line with a keyword that gives an indication for what's required of the recipient. And this is the system being advocated for basically, the first thing your email, so I'm reading directly from the article here, the first thing your email recipient sees is your name and subject line. So it's critical that the subject clearly states the purpose of the email, and specifically what you want them to do with your note. Military personnel use keywords that characterize the nature of the email, the subject. Some of these keywords include action, sign, info, decision, request, court action is for compulsory for the recipient to take some action. Sign requires the signature of the recipient. Info is for informational purposes only. And there is no response or action required. Decision requires that the recipient takes a decision. Request is seeking permission or approval from the recipient. And court is coordination buyer with recipient. So these aren't set in stone because you know, most people looking at using this are not going to be in the in a military environment. But I think that these are actually a great, I have these printed out and pinned next to my desk. And I think they're perfectly effective in the business environment, especially if you're dealing with senior executives or someone who's very busy. So as I said, I've tried to advocate for this system personally. The second thing that apparently they do is what's called bottom line upfront BLUF, which basically is if you've ever seen a diplomatic cable, like the information that WikiLeaks leaked and is available online, you can see the interesting format that diplomatic cables are written in. They have kind of a metadata field at the start, then they have a summary and then they go into the details and those are all, those are all organized very specifically. And it sort of reminds me of that it's a pretty similar system, the BLUF. It's apparently in the Air Force Handbooks and it kind of self explanatory. So what I like is that the author gave an example of an actual email and how this system would work in practice. So the subject line, and this is in obviously a business context, subject line info, working from home. So that's how you use it. You start with your declarative keyword, then the subject line, salutation, BLUF, the bottom line upfront. And the way this has been done here is just have that in bold. And then in background, you go into the detail of this. So the bottom line here reads, we'll reduce the number of days employees can work from home from three to one day per week effective December 1st. So somebody can just get that line and stop reading the email or they can go in for the detail after that. So again, I think this is a really, really effective system that has application far beyond the military context. Really effective, especially for people whose job involves communicating with very busy people. Email centric environments. I'm a huge email fan, even though it's kind of considered old fashioned these days. And if you are doing that or looking to communicate more effectively internally, then I think this is one of the best systems out there. And I'll put a link to this excellent article from the Harvard Business Review in the description of this video. Thank you guys very much for watching. If you want to get more videos from me, feel free to subscribe to this YouTube channel.