Fourteen items in two places beats four items in four

A request for fourteen bank statements comes back the same evening. A request for four things — a payslip, a passport, a letter from the accountant, and the deeds held by the solicitor who did the purchase — goes quiet for a fortnight.

The second list is shorter by every measure a firm uses. It is worse by the only measure that matters.

What the client is pricing is not your line count. It is the number of separate places they have to go. Fourteen statements come out of one login, in one sitting, while the television is on. Four documents from four destinations is four trips, and three of them need somebody else to reply first.

“Keep it short” is advice about the wrong dimension

The instinct to cut the list down to a memorable handful descends, loosely, from George Miller’s 1956 paper on the span of immediate memory — the famous seven, plus or minus two. That paper is about how many items a person can hold in their head at once. A document request is not held in anyone’s head. It sits in an inbox, and the client reads it with the whole list in front of them.

Nobody abandons a document request because they have forgotten item nine. They abandon it at item two, because item two needs a phone call to a former employer’s payroll provider, and it is nine in the evening.

The Behavioural Insights Team’s EAST framework (2014) puts “make it easy” first for this reason: small practical obstacles suppress completion more than people expect, and removing hassle usually does more than improving the argument. Which means the persuasive parts of your email — the deadline, the reason it matters, the polite pressure — are working on the wrong variable. The errand count is the variable.

Sort the list by where the client has to go

Not by your internal categories. “Identity”, “income”, “property” is a filing structure, and it scatters a client across four destinations inside a single heading. Sort by distance instead.

Where the item lives	Typical items	What it costs the client	Where it goes in your list
A drawer or a shelf	Passport, driving licence, certificates, paper statements, old correspondence	Minutes. Nobody else involved.	First
Their phone or email	Recent invoice, utility bill, completion statement, a photo they already took	Minutes, plus a search	First
A login they already have	Online banking, personal tax account, pension or platform portal	Ten minutes signed in. A whole evening if the password is gone and the code goes to an old phone.	Second
Another person	Accountant, employer’s payroll, landlord, previous solicitor, a family member	Days, and outside their control	Its own message, same day
An institution with a queue	HMRC by post, a register office, a former provider, a branch-only team	Weeks	Its own message, day one

Two items from the same drawer cost less than one item from a bank. That is the whole argument, and it is why the count is the wrong thing to trim.

Put the drawer first, so the first sitting produces something

A client who opens your list, finds the first item is a document behind a login they cannot remember, and closes the tab has produced nothing. A client who sends you three things from a drawer in four minutes is now in the middle of a job. The second one finishes.

There is a second reason, and it is the one that saves you the chase. Partial returns are diagnostic. If the drawer items come back and the login items do not, you know the block is an access problem and you can fix it with a phone call. Undifferentiated silence tells you nothing, which is exactly why firms read it as reluctance.

The long-lead errands still start on day one — they just do not belong in the list. Send them separately, one item per message, naming who holds it. A request that takes three weeks to satisfy should not be sitting in the same email as a passport photo, where it quietly sets the pace for everything above it.

The errands you should not be sending at all

Before you order the list, delete the items you can get yourself.

Filed accounts, directors, charges and the filing history of a UK company are free to view and download from the Companies House register. Asking a company director to find and send you their own filed accounts is an errand you invented. For property, HM Land Registry sells copies of the title register and title plan through its online service, at fees published on that service — check them on the day, since they change. Neither is a favour you need to ask for.

Where you cannot self-serve, one question often collapses the errand. HMRC’s guidance on getting an SA302 tax calculation turns on how the return was filed: a return filed through HMRC’s own online service can be printed from the client’s account, while a return filed by an accountant using commercial software generally means the calculation comes from that software instead. So ask which it was before you ask for the document. The answer decides whether you are requesting a two-minute print or starting a chain through a third party, and you want to know that before the item lands in your list at position three.

Every item you fetch yourself removes a trip. That is worth more than any line you cut for brevity.

When the errand is unavoidable, name the door

Some items genuinely sit with someone else. For those, the client is facing two unknowns — who to ask, and what to say — and both are yours to remove.

Name the holder. Then write the sentence they will forward, in full, so it can be copied without being composed: Please send me the signed accounts for the year ended 31 March 2026 as a PDF. A forwardable line is the difference between an errand and a task.

And check the access before you ask. “Can you still log in to the old pension portal?” is a cheaper question than four days of silence followed by “I couldn’t get in.”

Count destinations, not lines. Fourteen items across two destinations is one evening’s work and it will come back. Four items across four destinations is four requests wearing one coat, and the quiet that follows is not a client who does not want to help — it is a list nobody could finish in one go. Reorder it before you shorten it. The length was only ever the symptom.