SEED

Name the shape

Open the ten oldest unread or unanswered messages in your inbox. Oldest, not easiest. The easy ones are already answered, which is exactly why the hard ones are still sitting there.

Read each one once. Then name its shape. Six shapes cover most of a normal week. Write your own if none of these fit, because your discipline and your students are not mine.

1. The permission ask. “Is it okay if I…” They want a yes or a no, and where the edge of the yes sits.
2. The status check. “I wanted to make sure you got…” They want confirmation a thing landed. Nothing else in the message matters.
3. The deadline negotiation. The ask is near the end or inside a clause. The first sentence is context. They want a new date.
4. The lost student. “I do not understand the assignment.” They are asking where to start, not what the assignment says. Those are different questions.
5. The logistics question. Room, link, format, file type, platform. One line to answer, and usually already documented somewhere they did not find.
6. The disclosure wrapped in logistics. It reads like a deadline question. Somewhere inside, in half a sentence, is something real about that student’s life. Slow down here. This is the shape that makes speed reading the wrong instinct.

SPROUT

Write the question in your own words

For each message, write one line naming what it is really asking. Your words, not theirs. “She wants to know if the late policy applies to her.” “He does not know which file to upload.”

If you cannot write the line, leave it blank and move on. That blank is information. Either the message is genuinely ambiguous, in which case the correct reply is one question back rather than an answer, or it is shape six and there is something in it you have not finished reading.

0 of 10 named

GROW

Answer the question they did not ask

Every student email carries two questions. The one they asked, and the one they were about to ask next. The second is almost always what happens now, and you already know the answer because you have given it many times. They are asking for the first time.

A student asks whether they can hand the reflection in late. “Yes, by Friday” is correct, fast, and produces three more emails on Thursday. One extra sentence does not: “Yes, Friday at midnight is fine. Same dropbox as the original, it is still open. No late penalty because you asked before the due date. The discussion post is separate and still due tonight.”

Write the sentence you are going to start adding by default, in your own voice, for your own course.

HARVEST

Read your own distribution

Look back at your ten shapes and count them. Almost every instructor finds one shape dominates, and the dominant shape is usually a signal about something upstream of the inbox.

Half of it shape five, logistics? That is not an inbox problem. That is a course shell problem, and it is fixable in one afternoon in a way email never will be. Heavy on shape four, the lost student? Your first assignment prompt is doing something your syllabus is not.

Write what your distribution is, and what it is telling you.