Stop Calling People — Do This Instead
Do you enjoy wasting time? Then keep using your cellphone like a phone. For everyone else, it’s time to switch to asynchronous communication.
In the last 24 hours, I’ve spent nearly a full hour giving people data over the phone that could have been handled in 10 minutes via email. Look, the telephone (invented in 1876) was a great improvement over the telegram (invented in 1844), but telephone technology is now over 140 years old.
For a long time, fax machines dominated (and they still do in some industries, like healthcare, for legacy reasons that make no sense). When professional interactions were mostly business-to-business, you could simply fax data back-and-forth. Now, it seems there’s been a slide back to communication via plain-old telephone, which is bizarre in the era of Gmail and Slack.
For some reason, now that everyone is at home, and many of us are working as freelancers in the gig economy, I am on the telephone more than ever. When I mentioned to my doctor’s office last year that online scheduling would be convenient for both of us, the nurse took personal offense — even though she has to personally listen to and reply to every voicemail they receive.
