Correspondence Record Planning Checklist

List every party involved and the one person within each you will actually correspond with, including who covers for them when they are unavailable.

Messages sent to a general address or to whoever replied last are the ones that go unanswered without anybody noticing.

Ask who is entitled to give instructions on the project and who is entitled to receive them from you, and write that down before anything needs deciding quickly.

Owners frequently give directions to the wrong person in good faith, and the resulting confusion is difficult to unpick afterwards.

Ask your appointed professionals and the contractor to state the instruction route in writing, and take any question about its wording to your own legal adviser.

Decide which of you in the household sends and receives project messages, and make sure the other is copied rather than corresponding separately.

Two owners corresponding independently produce contradictory instructions, and the site cannot tell which one to follow.

Use one address or number for the project and keep it apart from everyday personal contact, so project messages are not lost between everything else.

A separate contact point makes the whole record retrievable in one place, which is exactly what you cannot achieve later.

Tell every party in writing which address to use for you, and repeat it when somebody replies from or to a different one rather than letting it drift.

Contact routes decay quietly, and by the time you notice, a whole thread has been happening somewhere you cannot see.

Decide who is copied on what as a matter of course, and note which parties should not be copied on exchanges that do not concern them.

Copying everybody on everything trains people to stop reading, and copying too narrowly leaves somebody acting on out-of-date information.

Agree with each party which channel is treated as the project record, and note it, so nobody is relying on a thread the other side does not consider binding.

Where two parties have different assumptions about what counts, both believe they have a record and neither has the same one.

What amounts to a valid communication under your agreement is a question for your own legal adviser rather than something to settle informally.

Be wary of settling anything of consequence inside a messaging app, and where it happens anyway, repeat the outcome through the agreed channel afterwards.

Chat threads are convenient and almost impossible to search later, and they are often on a personal device belonging to somebody who moves on.

Check whether any channel in use clears, expires or limits its history, and move anything that matters out of it before that happens.

Threads that expire take the only record of a decision with them, and nobody notices until the decision is questioned.

Decide what a group chat is allowed to be used for, such as arrival times and access, and keep decisions about the work itself out of it.

Group threads move fast, everybody assumes somebody else has recorded the outcome, and nobody has.

Where documents are exchanged through a shared folder, ask to be told by message whenever something is added or replaced rather than watching the folder yourself.

Files in shared folders change in place with no notification, and the previous version usually disappears with them.

Keep your own copy of important exchanges outside any platform provided by another party, since access to it may end when the work does.

Platform access is normally granted for the duration of the project, and the record you cannot reach is the one you will want.

After any call or conversation that touched on a decision, send a short note setting out what you understood and inviting correction if you have it wrong.

An invitation to correct is far better received than an assertion, and it produces the written record either way.

Write down anything said to you in passing that sounded like a decision, an instruction or a warning, along with who said it and where you were standing.

Passing remarks turn out to matter surprisingly often, and they leave no trace whatsoever unless the owner records them.

Record every occasion somebody asks you for a decision or a piece of information, since these are the requests that later appear to have gone unanswered.

Site delays are frequently attributed to owner decisions, and only your own note shows when you were asked and when you replied.

Do not record conversations without telling the other person, and where you would like a call captured, ask first and note their answer.

Recording somebody without their knowledge raises questions you should put to your own legal adviser before doing anything of the kind.

Write your note before leaving the property or ending the call rather than trusting it to memory, and keep it short enough that you will actually do it.

Notes written later are shorter, vaguer and often wrong on exactly the detail that mattered.

Where you are unsure what was meant, write down your uncertainty rather than filling the gap with your own interpretation of what they must have intended.

An owner interpretation recorded as fact tends to be quoted back later as though the professional had said it.

Keep each message to a single subject, and start a new one rather than adding an unrelated point to the end of a thread about something else.

Points buried at the bottom of a long message about another topic are the ones that get missed and never answered.

Write a subject line that names the room, item or drawing concerned, rather than a general reference to the project that every message shares.

Searching a mailbox works on subject lines, and identical subject lines make the entire record unsearchable.

Put what you are asking for in the first line, then the background, so a reader can tell straight away whether the message needs action from them.

Messages where the request appears at the end get read as commentary and filed rather than answered.

Name the drawing sheet, schedule item or earlier message you are relying on, rather than referring to what was said before without saying where.

Anchoring a message to a specific document lets the recipient check it, which is usually the fastest way to a straight answer.

Avoid letting a thread drift onto a new topic, and where it does, start a fresh message with a subject line describing the new subject.

Drifting threads hide decisions under a heading that gives no clue they are in there.

Where a message is written in frustration, set it aside and send the version that only states facts and the question you need answered.

Emotive messages get answered emotively, and the resulting exchange rarely contains the information you were after.

Save each attachment together with the message it arrived in, rather than pulling the file out and leaving the covering wording behind in a mailbox.

Statements such as issued for comment or still being worked up appear in the message and never on the document.

Keep the file name the sender used, and add your own note alongside rather than renaming the file into a naming system of your own.

Renamed files can no longer be matched to the sender records, which makes any later question about issue much harder to resolve.

Where a message refers to an attachment that is not there, reply asking for it straight away rather than assuming it will follow.

Missing attachments are usually noticed by nobody, and the sender genuinely believes you have the document.

Check that attachments have survived when a message is forwarded on to you, since files are commonly dropped somewhere along a chain of forwards.

A forwarded chain looks complete and can be missing the very document everybody in the chain is discussing.

Note any document you were shown on a screen but never sent, since it will otherwise shape what everybody believes was agreed without existing in your record.

Documents that never arrive are invisible in a correspondence record and are still relied on in conversation.

Where large documents arrive through a link, download your own copy promptly, since links to shared locations expire without warning.

An expired link leaves a message that appears to contain a document and actually contains nothing.

Keep a short list of questions you have asked and not had answered, with the date each was sent, and review it before every meeting.

Unanswered questions vanish from your attention quickly, and the ones that matter tend to be the ones that were hard to answer.

When chasing, repeat the original question in full rather than asking whether somebody has seen your earlier message, so the reply can be immediate.

A chaser that requires the recipient to go and find the original message is far less likely to produce an answer.

Treat any indication that a message has been read as evidence of delivery only, and never as agreement with anything it contained.

Whether silence or a read indication means anything at all under your agreement is a question for your own legal adviser.

Where a question goes unanswered, ask your contact who else it should be directed to rather than approaching somebody else and creating a parallel thread.

Parallel threads produce two different answers, and the site ends up acting on whichever one arrived first.

Note when a contact tells you they will be away and who is covering, and address messages accordingly rather than letting them sit unread.

Long silences frequently have a simple explanation, and knowing it saves both a chaser and a misunderstanding.

Reserve marking anything urgent for things that genuinely are, and use a call rather than a message where something needs immediate attention.

Anything affecting safety on site should be raised by speaking to somebody directly, never left to a written message to be picked up later.

Where an exchange turns on what your agreement says, stop and take it to your own legal adviser rather than offering your own reading of the wording.

Interpreting the terms of any agreement is for your own legal adviser; nothing you write should be treated as settling what a clause means.

Pass technical questions to the appointed professional whose area they fall in, rather than relaying an answer from one party to another in your own words.

Owners acting as a relay between specialists lose the qualifications that came with the original answer, and the loss is invisible.

Keep correspondence with neighbours in its own thread and its own folder, and be careful about forwarding it onward without their knowledge.

Neighbour exchanges have a different tone and audience, and mixing them into project threads causes avoidable friction.

Anything a neighbour raises about boundaries, access or shared structures should be taken to your appointed professionals and your own legal adviser.

Where any correspondence involves a local authority or utility, note who is dealing with them on your behalf and avoid contacting them separately in parallel.

What applies locally must be confirmed with the relevant authority; do not act on a second-hand account of what an authority is said to have accepted.

Avoid replying with a quick agreement to a proposal sent in a message, and say instead that you will respond once you have looked at it properly.

Short affirmative replies are quoted back as decisions, and they are usually sent before the implications have been considered.

Keep personal details of household members, access codes and security arrangements out of general project threads and shared folders.

Project threads are forwarded widely and stored in places you have no control over, often long after the work is finished.