Communication: the usual suspect

Over the years, I’ve become more and more aware of how we communicate with each other. It was never a conscious decision, but I ended up spending some time thinking about it and how I could thrive to make it better in my own life, by setting a few ground rules upfront.

The short version would be: if it’s urgent, call, otherwise, write.

Communicating with family

Family members are not always keen on abiding by certain rules, especially if they don’t see the benefits. But I personally prefer to communicate with family members via written chat, than say phone calls. We use Telegram to communicate, and have plenty of groups for different purposes.

For instance, just me and my wife have 3 different chats we use quite regularly:

• Direct communication: highest priority;
• Interesting stuff to look at: lowest priority;
• Stuff that needs action on: medium priority;

The goal here is so that just by listening to the sound my phone does, I’m able to assess whether or not I need to pick up my phone. Say you went for groceries and your wife messages you. You hear your phone and may think “perhaps she forgot to tell me something” and grab your phone. Only to realize that she just stumbled upon a video she found funny and wants to share it with you.
You end up “reading” the message but you’re not going to watch the video right away. In fact, you’re never going to watch it because you’re human and completely forgot about it until your wife mentions it again.
Ask me how I know.

Mark as unread

Which brings me to the next point. Most chat apps nowadays have this “mark as unread” feature. But I’d guess most people don’t use it that often. It’s about discipline, I’d say.

I need to see this when I get home.

This is what people usually think before locking their phones again and putting them back in the pocket. But without action, you’re solely relying on your brain. And by now you should know how unreliable of a system that is. At least for me, whenever I think stuff like this I need to write it down somewhere—and it’s usually Todoist. But if it’s really just a message I’m not going to address at the time, I just mark it as unread. I still get that “notification dot” on top of the app and I won’t forget it’s there.

Phone calls still work

Most phone calls I get are from older people—ignoring service and institution calls. There’s no denying that the younger people rely more on messages than phone calls. And that would be fine, if we all knew what that means.

Think about this for a minute: your phone rings non-stop when you get a phone call. It’s begging for your attention.
But when you get a message, it just lightly chirps at you, and then it’s silent again. This means something, to me at least.

It means that a phone call is a higher priority method of communicating than a message.

The “message” of the old days, is called mail. You know, the actual envelopes that show up in your physical mailbox. There’s no way anyone would expect a mail to be high priority. By its own nature, it just isn’t. It can take days for it to be delivered in the first place!

Communicating at work

If you know me just a little bit, you could see miles away where I was going with this post.

Back when work was barely depending on computers, people would still communicate all the time. And communication was either a phone call—for distant people—or a tap on the shoulder. The issue with these is that they’re both “urgent”. They may not actually be, but that’s just how synchronous communication feels like. Anyone that taps on your shoulder is expecting your attention now, not in 5 minutes.

Nowadays, most people work attached to a computer, in some way or another. We have plenty of tools at our disposal to make the best out of these small machines. And yet, we seem to not see how communication is affecting our productivity levels.

Some jobs more than others demand your complete focus and attention on a specific task at a time—let’s call it deep work. When you’re able to deeply focus on your work, you may even get in the zone, where you’ll feel like time stops and everything around you disappears and it’s just you, the keyboard and whatever it is you’re doing—it’s magical!

When you’re not allowed to work on your tasks for a long period of time and are constantly interrupted with phone calls, shoulder taps or even instant messages, you loose your focus. And the issue with that is that it’s costly to get it back.

Anyone that demands your attention, even just for a 5 minute talk, might say that you’re just spending 5 minutes. But the reality is that after that conversation is over, you need to get your brain back into what you were doing. And that may take much longer than just 5 minutes. In fact, the longer you loose focus, the longer it may take you to go back.

Now imagine the daily life of a modern job where you’re invited to several meetings throughout the day and are still expected to deliver a project. You can’t just look at it like “it’s just 2 hours of meetings, I’ll still have another 6 hours to work on my project”. Meetings alone would be 25% of your day. Now spread them throughout your day and consider the time you’ll need to get back into the task you were doing and see that percentage quickly rise to something closer to 40–50%.

How the hell do you get actual work done? And yes, I’m implying meetings are not actual work.

We need clear expectations

Although tools like Slack and Teams allow you to communicate instantly with anyone on your team, you need to know upfront what to expect from it. Tools that show you’re online or typing indicate that you’re expected to be present. But unless your actual work is talking with your team, you’re not actually working.

Just because you’re in the office, doesn’t mean you’re working.

And to be completely fair, I do believe this is more of a cultural issue, than a tool issue. The tools just mirror the cultural issue.

Companies and managers need to understand that work gets done when you’re not responding to their messages, not the other way around. They need to set the expectation upfront that even though the messaging app you use say you’re online, it doesn’t mean you’re available. And it should be encouraged to turn off notifications for a long period of your day so that you can focus on your tasks—you know, the actual work.

There are better tools out there, like Twist, that lack online and typing indicators on purpose. Especially for those who work with team mates in different timezones, you may never be able to actually communicate with a team mate in real time. And that’s fine, you just need to be aware of it. If a task gets blocked because you’re waiting on your team mate from Taiwan to reply, I’m sure you have other tasks you can get going. It’s not like you’re done for the day.

Writing takes effort

Something else I’ve been noticing over the years is the fact that most people write as they speak. And the issue is that most people are not super clear when they speak. I mean, chances are you’re thinking while you’re speaking, so you’re effectively doing two things at once. And by now we should all know how bad our brains are at multitasking.

The good thing about writing a message instead of calling is that you have plenty of time to think about what is it that you need to communicate with that message and then write it down in the most effective and clear way possible.

Think about what an email or a letter usually looks like. Is it any similar to what the usual instant message looks like? Instant messaging apps invite us to write quick and short messages—1 liners. While emails invite us to take a step back and think before writing. We need to communicate more like emails and less like 1 liners. We need to be clear when we communicate.

A very positive side effect of writing is that everything is searchable. Need to know what was the decision your team got to on that task you have pending? Just search for it. Need to know how many water bottles your wife asked you to bring from the supermarket? Search for it! Your whole life becomes indexable. And yes, this can also bring negative aspects of the digital world into play, but I’m not touching on those today.

Takeaways

• Call for urgent matters. Write for everything else;
• Use separate chats (by priority) to signal importance;
• Mark messages as unread or add to your to‑do list to avoid forgetting;
• Phone calls and real‑time cues imply higher urgency than messages;
• Set expectations at work: being online ≠ being available;
• Protect your deep focus time slot;
• Write clearly—treat messages more like emails for searchable, useful records;

This became a bit longer than what I was initially expecting.
But hey—communicating is hard! Or so I’ve heard.