31–40 of 102 posts
This ignores the human side of things - people want relationships, empathy and sometimes just to be listened to. A call with your manager where they say "yes, I agree with everything you said - go ahead and do it, I trust you" can mean much more than the same thing said in a text message.
If you don't like calls, then ask the person requesting it to email/message you want you want to discuss and any decisions that you're hoping to make it from it before accepting it. It's not much, but at least you now have a focus for the call. If you disagree that a call is needed, tell them and request to handle it over async comm lines. It's possible the other party is dealing with some complex or ambiguous and a…
Seems like a local maximum or organizing around an individual’s quirks. Like all team building I feel like the fundamental question is, “what works for this group of people?” Rather than “teams with/without calls is superior,” and slamming every team you work with into it.
Richard Dawkins, coined the concept of extended phenotype which proposes that genes do not just build physical bodies, but actively shape the outside world to ensure their propagation.
> But for me, it becomes the event my whole day starts to revolve around. I have to break out of my flow, put my tasks on hold, take the call, and then get back into context. In the end, a 10-minute call can cost me several hours of focus. Occasionally I get this feeling for a large customer meeting or a public talk, because there are consequences and serious prep. But this is just trying to normalize extreme social…
And you need meetings to do all of this? There are so many other ways to communicate which you make more use of when you are less dependent on meetings. It's not a binary choice between meetings and extreme social anxiety.
English is vague, even when accounting for that fact. It's much more difficult to detect or correct misunderstandings over text. My biggest issue with this concept is time. You write your wall of text, I see that you've failed to account for some factor, so I write my wall of text. You don't completely understand my wall of text and ask for clarification. Back and forth, asynchronously. In a call this can be resolved…
I have the opposite experience. Phone calls almost always leave me feeling that something important has been left out. But there is no record so I can't re-read it to find out if I forgot or if it was just not mentioned. Luckily I rarely had to deal with such things because most of my work required written specifications and technical standards anyway, plus our teams were scattered in widely different time zones so t…
> But for me, it becomes the event my whole day starts to revolve around. I have to break out of my flow, put my tasks on hold, take the call, and then get back into context. In the end, a 10-minute call can cost me several hours of focus. Occasionally I get this feeling for a large customer meeting or a public talk, because there are consequences and serious prep. But this is just trying to normalize extreme social…
> Another is that people are not automata. Humans require inspiration and motivation and you need to reinforce the vision of what you are building and why. Its also even sometimes a reasonable idea to ask about how their life is going and check up on their family and pets and career aspirations. And you need meetings to do all of this? There are so many other ways to communicate which you make more use of when you ar…
Yes, "this meeting could have been an email", async communication and all that jazz. Nonetheless stating that a 10 minutes quick chat is going to be the center of that day for you definitely signals social anxiety.
> But for me, it becomes the event my whole day starts to revolve around. I have to break out of my flow, put my tasks on hold, take the call, and then get back into context. In the end, a 10-minute call can cost me several hours of focus. Occasionally I get this feeling for a large customer meeting or a public talk, because there are consequences and serious prep. But this is just trying to normalize extreme social…