Text me, quick

One of the main advantages of electronic textual communications is its potential asynchronicity.  The recipients of your messages do not have to read them upon arrival, and you, too, can choose when to check up on the messages you have received.  This allows each person to meld the receipt and transmittal of messages into his or her daily schedule, to be dealt with at convenient times.  It enables one, too, to think through a message you have received, perhaps reading it several times, so your response can be more meaningful.

A sad reflection of our times is that you have read the previous paragraph and are probably saying, “Not so.”  Society has already evolved to expect that you will be online all the time.  You have become but a vessel collecting the rainfall of text as it arrives, always poised to answer promptly.  If you do not answer a message quickly enough, you will be pestered by a follow-up note wondering if you received the first one.  As I have watched traffic over the last ten years, the half-life of that sequence has shrunk by two orders of magnitude:  In 2002, it was not uncommon to expect a response within a day.  In 2012, the expectation is often 10 minutes.

What a burden we have thus created for ourselves.  A tool that could have enhanced our lives rebounds to remove control.  A tool that could have enabled us to organize our days more fruitfully acts instead to impair time management.

Is there some compensation for this change?  Has the ease of using social media helped draw us together?  While I am a strong proponent and active user of social media, I cannot be blind to the fact that it serves to isolate as well as connect.  You just have to watch teenagers walking down the street together, texting other friends, to get a sense of this dichotomy.  Even easy-to-use old-fashioned email is the source of many misunderstandings and often stands in the way of face-to-face conversations that might be more productive, efficient, and engaging.  This is especially the case in email exchanges that comprise serial messages back on forth on the same topic.

I once knew a dean at university who was enamored of the idea that she could send a long email to the president of the school, receive an equally thoughtful one in reply, respond with another of her own, get another one back, and so on.  One day, unsatisfied with the result of one such exchange, she was mentioning her correspondence to a colleague who said, “Why don’t you go and talk with him?”  It was easy enough to do so, in that he had an open door policy.  Nonetheless, she answered with shock, saying, “Do you think he would have the time to do that?”  She missed the point that she and the president had spent hours on the subject in the course of their written correspondence, failing to communicate sufficiently well to reach an agreement.  Sure enough, a ten-minute meeting in person ironed out the misunderstandings.

There is an experiment that I wanted to try in my hospital, but I left the job before doing so.  I offer it to you for consideration: Designate Monday as an email-free, texting-free day (except for matters of clinical necessity.)  Spend this first day of each week talking with your colleagues in person or on the telephone.  Even then, minimize use of the telephone:  Get up and walk down the corridor or downstairs to the next floor whenever you can.

Some of you are already saying that you will “never get your work done” if you adopt this approach.  But I have a theory about this.  I think you will actually get more work done.  I think you will eliminate a large number of misunderstandings and re-work.  I think you will learn about problems in the making and help avoid them.

Most importantly, I think you will also be reminded how much you like your fellow workers and enjoy their company.

Try it, and let me know how it goes.  You can text me, tweet me, or comment here on the blog or on Facebook.  :)