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Monday, August 15, 2011

Phone vs. Email

I admit it. I'm an email guy at heart. I'll gladly spend 10 minutes hammering out an email (or using any other form of asynchronous, electronic dialogue like a forum, Twitter, or G+) than picking up a phone for one minute.

Why? I'm not as good at spontaneous discussions as I am at writing. There's no record of the conversation that I can refer back to. I worry that the person on the other end doesn't want to talk with me for some reason. I hate to make small talk. I forget to ask or say certain things. Sometimes I say the wrong thing. Because it's spontaneous and anyone can say or ask anything, I don't have control over the conversation in the same way I do with email.

But my reluctance to pick up the phone is a limitation, and not just because it takes more time to write an email than it does to speak on the phone with someone. A sizable portion of the population of the population prefers to use the phone over asynchronous communication. For instance, at my old job, I learned who these people were, and tried to accomodate them. Sometimes I was forced to -- they did not consistently respond to email, which meant that I had to pick up the phone or grab them in the hallway if I happened to see them.

I've found that of my two new ventures, the people I interact with for the tech startup are very much focused on email, Yammer, and Twitter. The phone is important only when we have a face-to-face meeting and need to let the other party know where we are or that one of us will be late.

For the six-month product startup, on the other hand, I have found that almost everybody is a phone guy. I suspect it relates to the quick-moving culture of manufacturing, where people tend to be on the shop floor or moving between meetings. Of course, they won't necessarily adapt to my communications needs, so it's up to me to adapt to their ways of doing business -- which means organizing my thoughts, gritting my teeth, and picking up the phone.

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