Is your house on fire? Call me. If not? Don’t call me.
I work in software development. If it’s not written down, it never happened.
People are free to call me to discuss it, or schedule a meeting, but they will only ever activate my trap card: “Sounds fine, please put that in writing in an email so I can action it.”
“Oh, you recorded the meeting? No I don’t need a copy, but that will make it easy for you to listen back to it while you’re putting it in writing in an email.”
“Of course, you’re welcome to text me, but keep in mind, it needs to be in writing in an email so I can action it.”
“Mmm see, I’d really love to action that now, but it needs to be in writing in an email first. Company policy.”
I should know, I wrote that policy.
Very strong praxis, very nice.
I’m starting to think these people are as afraid of a keyboard as I am of a phone.
“Yeah sure, they asked me 12 times they needed that info in writing… but maybe they meant in writing or… over the phone? Maybe I will call again to discuss it. Surely it will be okay. They will be grateful that I didn’t write an email. Who likes that?”
Maybe I’m just old and out of touch, but honestly if it takes more than like 3-5 messages, yes I’d prefer a call. I got shit to do, not write a small novel in messages on my phone.
But the person on the other side also has shit to do and taking a call may disrupt their work.
There’s no silver bullet. In some situations one thing might be better for both, while in others, not so much.
I’m neurodivergent and messages are significantly more accessible to me, especially in a work context.
I struggle to take in audio information, so if it’s important then messages are much better because I can refer back to them. If it’s not important, it’s not worth the interruption because messages also don’t take me out of my workflow because it’s asynchronous so I can read and respond when I’ve got a moment. A 5 minute unscheduled call is significantly more disruptive to me than an hour long scheduled meeting.
No matter how many times I tell my boss all of this, I get at least one unscheduled no context “do you have a minute to chat?” every single day and it’s effect on my productivity is very problematic.
It honestly depends on the person asking. There are people who aren’t complete morons where a call is a valid way to quickly solve a problem or exchange info.
But I sent a guy an email asking a simple multiple choice question, he messages “quick call?”, calls, shares his screen, shows me my own email with his written response in reply, and reads it to me.
Messages are nearly always better IMO because they don’t demand my immediate and undivided attention, the exception being an emergency or similar, which would warrant that.
A phone call means I have to stop whatever I’m currently doing, at a potentially inconvenient time, to deal with it whilst also having no idea how long the call will be. Messages can be dealt with whenever you’re actually free to deal with them.
Plus when you’re dealing with companies or the government, phone calls don’t give you a record of what was discussed, messages/emails do
