Preach. I would love to see all email like this. I learnt this in my very first work place and will never get the trend of starting every email with "I hope you are doing well".

I live and work in France, and oh boy... It's just cultural. Every email is like a letter to the King. "Would you be so kind enough to consider my humble request that is described hereafter in next three paragraphs". Funny thing: I welcome AI summaries on those.

My other pet peeve: meeting invitations. Half of the meetings in my calendar are called "Point" in French (loosely translated as "Topic"), the other half has no descriptions but the headlines. I tried the "I am not going unless I know why I am invited" thing to no avail - you cannot win this against the entire org.

So, you guess from the list of invitees. Or ask the organizer at lunch. Then go with them to the meeting to discuss the Topic for 15 minutes. Which could have been easily discussed at lunch, but lunch time is reserved to discuss food, not work.

Oh well. I love our cuisine, though. And the culture, and people, everything really. Just not how we write email.

> I live and work in France, and oh boy... It's just cultural. Every email is like a letter to the King. "Would you be so kind enough to consider my humble request that is described hereafter in next three paragraphs".

Ha! When I was in grad school, we had a brilliant French student in our team. He did his MS, and decided halfway he hated the US (understandable at the time) and would return to Europe for the PhD.

When he started applying for positions, he would just keep cursing. When I asked what was wrong, he said he'd gotten used to the (more) direct American approach, and was finding it burdensome to write formal, sycophantic emails to people in France.

I’ve set my work calendar to auto rejects invitations without an agenda. If you can randomly steal 30 minutes of my time, you will be required to at least give me some minimal context as to why. The rejection note simply says, “please include an agenda”