Are you afraid to talk on the phone? Do you have a mysterious, gnawing instinct to avoid face-to-face contact? Do you catch yourself making rationalizations like “I bet he won’t be there if I call, I’ll just e-mail and wait for his response.”
These are signs your brains has vomited on itself and become reliant on your keyboard as its sole communications outlet. Beware.
This happened to me the other day: I had an e-mail exchange going with someone, and their latest request didn’t make sense. He was asking me to do something, but I couldn’t figure out what. My first instinct was to a fire off a quick “Hey, I don’t get this” e-mail and sit happily awaiting his reply.
Then, in an act of self-defiance, I picked up the phone to call him. I hadn’t ever spoken with him before, but hey, the number was right there on the e-mail signature. How hard could it be?
Not very. In all of 45 seconds I had my question figured out and was moving on with my work. E-mail would have taken 10 times as long and would’ve had a much higher chance of miscommunication.
Which brings me to an idea my friend Dan exposed me to: the higher the fidelity of your communication, the better chance you have of making yourself understood. Makes sense, right? A phone with a good connection is better than a walkie-talkie with white noise and static. An MP3 with a high bit rate transmits communicates more than one with a low bit rate.
In other words, the higher the fidelity, the clearer the message. E-mail, with its asynchronism and ability to attach rich documents, is great for certain kinds of messages. But when it comes to quick conversation and explanations, it has a low bit rate. And I think many of us have become so e-mail-saturated that we get lazy and abuse it in simple situations.
Good article. I agree 100%.
I recently discussed a small project over the phone a few times with someone, and then sent him an email that proposed terms for the project. Over the phone, we had great rapport, but apparently my email conveyed a different tone. (He thought the email was one-sided in favor of Slantwise and lacked the rapport.) So we talked by phone again, and came to an understanding.
So there are two sides to this experience. First, I wrote the email excited to work with the guy, and he read it as me being a hardass. So the tone didn’t come through. But second, in a few 30-minute phone calls, we liked each other, but miscommunicated on details by being overly nice and accommodating. It took an email to get down to the concrete details.
Of course, this is a different situation than yours, Bruno – you were dealing with project instructions, and I was negotiating. But it’s interesting how each form of communication has different advantages and disadvantages.
Very true—To me the best early measurement of success of a software project is how well the team and the customer are communicating. Agile software development practices “the on-site customer” in an attempt to completely remove communication ambiguity by increasing fidelity to a maximum. Also, any discussion of email communication should be followed with a critique of instant messaging. Both are important but neither are the best case scenario.
I actually think the time day, rather than the text format itself is e-mail’s biggest weakness. Because of the delay, people try to fit every bit of information into an e-mail, as a way to limit the number of replies for clarification. The problem being of course, that it is both time-consuming and ineffective. We can’t possibly foresee every question a person might ask, and we often end up saying a lot of things that aren’t needed. And the discussions can still take forever to come to any resolution. E-mail is the waterfall of conversation methods.
Phone calls obviously avoid this by allowing each party to say only a small amount and then seek clarification, allowing you to avoid saying things you don’t need to and getting to the important bits faster. However, I don’t think phone calls are always thee right method.
I’ve found text-based chats can be much better for group discussions than conference calls. We worked on a project once where we had two development teams in two different states. We used Campfire for day-day discussions and were generally able to resolve most issues pretty efficiently. In contrast, when business folks (who weren’t part of our online discussions) called a conference call together, few things were resolved and it tied up a lot of people’s time.
I’d even venture to say that an in-person group meeting while better than a conference call in many ways can still be less effective than a text-based group chat. In some ways, the limits text-only chat imposes can actually help group conversations. It forces the issue. Makes it harder to get off-topic or belabor a point to death.
Bah. I hate the phone in most circumstances. I’d much prefer instant messaging. It solves most of the time delay problem without necessarily demanding your full attention, not to mention you get to make a record of all your communications that way.
Phone conversations are inefficient when you’re trying to multitask. If you’re not multitasking, then you’re trying to focus, in which case the phone is detrimental to that focus. So, for me, the phone is only good when you don’t have anything better to do (and I almost always do).
Also, phone systems don’t keep records very well. It’s starting to get better with IP phones and such, but it still stucks. Voicemail is a horrific way to exchange information (although things like GrandCentral are helping), and callerID isn’t reliable or even accurate sometimes. It can also be blocked. Cell phones are better than desk phones in this regard, but software systems are far ahead.
Dan, ditto your sentiment about meetings vs. chats. I’d say at least half of the meetings I’ve ever been to could have been chats and taken less time and disseminated the same amount of information.
@Aggieben: agreed, phone conversations are inefficient when multi-tasking. That’s the point; they force you to focus on communication. I’m talking about situations where you need an answer to continue working. If you don’t get it, or wait for an e-mail, then you have to move on to some other work, which breaks your focus and flow.
Good point about not have a record of phone conversations. That’s one advantage of e-mail over phone, but I think it’s insidious in big corporate cultures (CYA, keep a trail of who said what to whom).
@DanW: great point about phones being agile. That’s a much better way of putting it than what I wrote! Phone conversations allow you to make lots of small course corrections (iterations), incorporating instant feedback into each.
Also true about in-person meetings; one-to-one conversations work well because there are only two parties involved, so the signal is clear and the line isn’t noisy. Group conversations multiply the number of signals going over the wire, increasing the chances of getting bogged down.
This is exactly why people still travel across the world to meet face to face, even when video conferencing is available. That’s why you visit your real estate before buying it. When its important, there is no substitute for being there.
I don’t know if email helps with multitasking, which I think its largely myth anyway, as you cannot focus on more than one thing at a time. It does help with asynchronous communication and one-to-many communication. I express myself and move on to something else. You’re unavailable at that particular moment or finding you is a hassle, so you chime in later.
Now if we can just solve the blogging communication problem. You know the one, where I post this response but no one who’s already read this posting will see it unless they are in the habit of reading things more than once or they place way too much importance on this topic. And I’ll never see your response to this comment, as I am done with this
Alan: interesting point RE blogs. Blog comments aren’t exactly the best way to carry on a sustained conversation. But the upside of blog comments is that they persist, and that they’re indexed by Google. So there may only be a hundred people who see your comment within the next few days, but a thousand people may see it over the next 10 years. I’ve been enlightened many times by blog posts and discussions that are months or years old.