2 ms·

Opinionated personal experience: If you need to meet face to face, it's because you have to "arm twist" people to get things done. And/or it's because you hav

Opinionated personal experience: If you need to meet face to face, it's because you have to "arm twist" people to get things done. And/or it's because you have a knowledge/learning/teaching impedance -- a disparity between these abilities in roles and co-workers -- that is too large. Speaking of "knowledge work". In the physical world, an example can be worth a thousand words. But when you have to keep showing someone the same thing over and over... In knowledge work, I find frequent, repetitive meetings to be a version of that "over and over".

ergothus 8y ago
While I think your points are valid, in my experience many people are more comfortable communicating face-to-face. They've had decades of practice at it. They will talk about "body language" and fail to recognize how often such cues are interpreted wrong. They fail to see their discomfort as a flag of a problem and instead see IT as the problem. They (and many if us that prefer text communication) fail to realize that communication is a skill like any other that requires deliberate practice to improve in any great degree. An example: dont ask a question with two alternate examples, you'll get a "yes" or "no" that isnt helpful and require at least one more cycle for them to clarify (usually more than one, because THEY know what they meant, so unless you explain your confusion well, it is 1+ cycles to explain your confusion and then another to get the answer. ) DON'T: "is the shutdown this weekend or next? " DO: "the shutdown is this weekend, correct?" Or "the shutdown is this weekend and not next, correct?" You wouldn't expect a "yes" answer to the "or" question, but it happens all the time. Conversations are "time-delayed" - our minds are constantly back filling guesses at the meaning, and often we respond when we have the wrong guess. Changing this is HARD. I seriously think modern conversational practices have a lot of redundancy in them for error correction, but this also makes people find any impediment to communication (such as the quality of a call or having to wait for someone to pause so you can actually be heard) more annoying.

ergothus 8y ago

While I think your points are valid, in my experience many people are more comfortable communicating face-to-face. They've had decades of practice at it. They will talk about "body language" and fail to recognize how often such cues are interpreted wrong. They fail to see their discomfort as a flag of a problem and instead see IT as the problem. They (and many if us that prefer text communication) fail to realize that communication is a skill like any other that requires deliberate practice to improve in any great degree. An example: dont ask a question with two alternate examples, you'll get a "yes" or "no" that isnt helpful and require at least one more cycle for them to clarify (usually more than one, because THEY know what they meant, so unless you explain your confusion well, it is 1+ cycles to explain your confusion and then another to get the answer. ) DON'T: "is the shutdown this weekend or next? " DO: "the shutdown is this weekend, correct?" Or "the shutdown is this weekend and not next, correct?" You wouldn't expect a "yes" answer to the "or" question, but it happens all the time. Conversations are "time-delayed" - our minds are constantly back filling guesses at the meaning, and often we respond when we have the wrong guess. Changing this is HARD. I seriously think modern conversational practices have a lot of redundancy in them for error correction, but this also makes people find any impediment to communication (such as the quality of a call or having to wait for someone to pause so you can actually be heard) more annoying.