Most people are drowning in email at work. Often times you’re asked to provide one of a few responses: positive confirmation (I received this, read it, understand it all, and explicitly approve), negative confirmation (I will tell you my thoughts and describe what is wrong with this), or a passive confirmation (if I don’t respond, consider everything good to go!). The trick to managing people that receive a high-volume of email is to stop sending lengthy letters looking for a confirmation, waiting days and days and days. Sometimes, in order to keep things moving or get things done without asking permission (with folks you trust, and who trust you), simply ask for a passive confirmation: “Hey John, here is the final set of comps for the landing page. Everything we discussed yesterday is shown here including the new form style and the green button. Unless I hear otherwise, we’ll go ahead and implement this on Friday.” No more response email clutter, no debate, just delete. If you did this right, you won’t get a response. Otherwise, you’ve severely done a misdoing and you’ll hear from those folks “too busy to respond” nearly immediately. ;)