Email wasn’t meant to replace the telephone

Monday, August 7th, 2006 Notes by Paul Flyer

Email is not always the best communication media. Email is not the only communication media. I think we have forgotten the other means of human communication: our voice.

The thoughts for this posts began to crystallize as I read Kawasaki’s advice about constructing emails. His advice is very sound. However, the larger question needs to be asked whether it is appropriate to email at all and whether one should instead use the phone.

This post is born out of a pet peeve. I am tired of being dealt with strictly via email. In the spirit of Problogger’s post dealing with the humanity of people, please deal with me as a person, not as a machine that reads text.

In partcular, here are some thoughts about the use of email at home and at work.

Home

Email helps us stay in touch with a larger number of people than would be possible via telephone. We can write one “update on my life newsletter” and send it to 100 of our closest friends. However, email is not the place to settle personal disagreements. Personal disagreements are best resolved face to face or on the phone. We need to be human and stop hiding behind email. Email has become the tool for cowards. This can be said as well for blogs and blog commenters.

Neither is email the best for inviting somebody to an early saturday basketball game when it is sent after 9 pm on the Friday before the event. I don’t check my personal email everyday. Nor do I always check it late at night. For items that require an immediate response or are VERY important I prefer someone pick up the phone and call me.

I have a relative that lives half way around the world from me. While I have emailed and kept in touch that way, I look forward to the opportunites we get to talk on the phone. I could email them everyday, but it is not until I hear their voice that I truly feel “in touch.”

Work

Email is great for tracking and documenting ongoing discussions and decisions. Work email is almost always up on my desktop and it can alert me when mail arrives. It works great for a large number of things. However, again, we forget about face to face communication. Somedays are filled with meetings and email is not regularly checked. Sometimes people say, “I’ve been trying to email you where have you been?” I tend to think “I have both a desk phone and a celluar phone, did you try to call? Did you try to talk to a co-worker to find out where I was?.” For important matters I almost always follow up with a phone call or hoof it up three floors to visit the person at their desk. The face to face (or voice to voice) communication strengthens the message sent in the email. The email serves as a document of the conversation. If, during the conversation, the topic/decision/discussion changes, I can later resend an email documenting the change. However, it was the personal face to face conversation which cements the deal.

So in the end, talk. Use your voice. Don’t be afraid. When I make the effort at work to call or go to someone’s desk, it speaks volumes. More times than not, people appreciate the more personal contact. There is balance in everything of course. Don’t bother your boss every five minutes.

[tags]email, telephone, voice[/tags]