Written communication is remote work super power

What that taught me is every form of communication has it's uses. For full effect you often need multiple types. Talk on the phone. Send a follow up email. Then talk on the phone again. Update the original email into a formal doc. Two engineers with a whiteboard can solve some problems in a few minutes that would take days of back and forth over text.

Formal text though is usually very good. Especially if the author can produce high quality output quickly. This is my particular failing.

In my mind there are multiple goals a perfect system should have:

- Must be easy to create a new "conversation" - Must be possible to write long form content in a "post", where "post" is the first item in a conversation - Must be able to have a meaningful conversation with replies to specific points - Must be able to change the content of the "post" based on the discussion that happened (such that a "post" can be a poll, participants discuss options, and the final decision is summarized) - Must be able to easily enter and exit the full conversation - Must be able to easily link the full conversation, for referencing - Must be able to set metadata (dates, relevant people, status, stuff like that)

We have many systems, but none really fits the bill:

- Email is probably the worst, because you can't modify the original message, you can't link to it and you can't transparently enter the conversation if you weren't part of it initially. We've all seen the "adding XYZ to the loop" that provide 0 content to the conversation. There's also the whole issue about top-posting and lack of proper threading that make having a conversation difficult. Probably just a client issue rather than a protocol issue though - NNTP is a step above, but ironically because it has remained niche the clients and the etiquette help having a proper conversation. Still doesn't fill the bill - Ticket systems are paradoxically pretty good for this situation. They do contain the necessary structure for incorporating metadata, in all the various forms ingenuity can come up with.... sometimes too much ingenuity, such as the labels and fields and knobs that were needed for that project years ago are still here, cluttering a lot of space because most aren't actually needed anyway. Imagine using such a mess - A wiki is nice, but the emphasis on structuring is detrimental for flows that go outside of documenting. Sometimes you just want a linear list of conversations ordered by date - Google docs and associated are good for really long forms for the initial "post", but are not very good at structured conversation

Perhaps the best software, for all those use cases, is a forum software. I'm partial to the (old) reddit UX or the HN UX; remove the useless voting and it's almost the perfect way to communicate. The interface gives you the space to actually take time about what you want to say and properly articulate it. HN is a bit terse here, reddit gives you formatting helps to nicely present your ideas and makes reading it easier.

Only drawback is that they are text only, and sometimes you need to include non-text (a screenshot of the planned changes, a video of the flow to document, a map of the place you're discussing about, ...)

(If it is not clear already, I'm still sad at the death of Google Wave. 10 years later and it's still the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw)

It doesn‘t make sense to hand a listener type a manuscript without talking about the subject, and it doesn‘t make sense to set up meetings with a reader type before you hand off the written argument.

We should perhaps just accept that an tolerate each other where our strengths are.

[1] Peter F. Drucker: Managing Oneself. https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Oneself-Harvard-Business-Cla...

Edit: Online: http://academic.udayton.edu/lawrenceulrich/LeaderArticles/Dr...