Right, it’s ultimately about picking the right medium for a given discussion, be that tickets, email, a call, or some kind of messaging. That can vary person to person as well, so it’s always a bit of a compromise.
This is my primary issue with async communication. Ive had email and slack conversations which lasted days where there was a 4 hour gap between messages and it is horrible.
In a call you can't be ignored or left on read for 4 hours.
> In a call you can't be ignored or left on read for 4 hours.
You also have no time to formulate a thoughtful answer to complex questions, though, which is one my issues. Calls are fine for some things, but 90% of calls could be an email because they contain discussion that needs more than 15 minutes of thinking. And a lot of the time, these calls need a summary email to even keep track of what was said!
I think the gap issue in async communication is a feature, not a bug.
Right. The point is that reasonable response time can turn a 10 minute conversation into a 48 hour long conversation that requires me to context switch 11 times over two days instead of just once.
If it's a straightforward product that might not happen. If it's a product with lots of subtle complications and I need to ask lots of questions whose answers depend on their answers to previous questions it will definitely happen.
As someone on the Autistic spectrum... yes, yes you most certainly can. When you're speaking I'm (not necessarily voluntarily-)daydreaming about my current hyperfocus/obsession. I'm tuned-in just enough to not reply with something so far out of left field that it gives away that my attention is elsewhere, but I'm definitely not listening to you. Your words are going in one ear and right out the other. I'll shoot you an e-mail for "clarification" later.
I hate this about myself and I've worked very hard to overcome it, but after thirty-seven years I've learned to accept that it's my baseline. I'll have to actively work against it for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, this applies to meetings and lectures as well. In school and, later, university I had to go to class and teach myself the material each night.
> I don't dislike calls, I just hate time wasting. And some e-mail threads should have been a call.
I like to think I can "read the room". I particularly try to send email, versus a call, when the recipient will need to take time to prepare a thoughtful reply.
I've had several calls, sparked after a detailed email, where I end up reading my message literally word-for-word only to be met with the response: "Yeah-- we I'll need to respond to that offline".
Just. Read. My. Damned. Email.
I think very little of people who won't take the time to read anything longer than a couple sentences. It's especially galling because I work hard to write terse, bottom-line-up-front style-emails.
Hot take: W/ LLMs being used to summarize text, and robust text-to-speech, maybe I won't have as time-wasting calls. The kind of person who can't be bothered to read probably likes those kinds of things.
