The discoverability of written thought decreases with its quantity.
It comes down to knowing your sources, not relying on some Bacon number of reinforced echoes.
Written communication is remote work super power
71–80 of 194 posts
Re: Written communication is remote work super power
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I follow that statement. I can see an argument that text is not strictly better than verbal communication but, at worst, I'd say it's equal (for people as a whole, not for one person in particular). Some people are better at written communication while some are better at verbal.
For most people, I'll happily agree with you. From a dyslexic's perspective, being forced to only ever present one's ideas and thoughts in text is pretty restricive.
And that's fair.. for a dyslexic, written communication is worse. I wasn't trying to imply that, for all people, which medium is better varies for each individual. I was trying to say that, over the set of all people, which medium is better tends to vary by person. That neither medium is "better" for everyone.
Re: Written communication is remote work super power
#73When writing you are not getting feedback (give more context, go faster, what concerns to address). A back and forth can be a much faster way (both in total time elapsed and time spend) to resolve something. At GitLab we recommend async by default and jump to sync when you start going back and forth. https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchro...
Re: Written communication is remote work super power
#74Async communication is suitable to resolve some kind of issues. But it has two drawbacks: participants need to be competent at writing and reading prose (it’s harder than it sounds) and even with the best of care your ideas can easily be misinterpreted resulting in the loss of an async cycle. For problems which are not well defined, and where a lot of decisions need to be taken, especially when they verge toward the…
Recently, I was so frustrated with some folks poor reading comprehension that I was thinking about an imaginary communication system that would allow for decision making where there were some rules: - No responding from mobile devices. The poor response rate is just too high. - The reader is quizzed on the the contents of the communication before they can respond (randomly generated quizzes might be amusing). - The r…
> - No responding from mobile devices. The poor response rate is just too high.
For me, the tendency of slack to let users write very short sentences/phrases is the issue. Etiquette for slack allows very IM like messages, whereas Emails are generally required to be more verbose.
Re: Written communication is remote work super power
#75In my team if someone needs to pick up the kids he just says it in chat or even in a video meeting and gets them. I think webex meetings work better than real live ones. If they are tiring that's positive because meetings last too long. If only one person can speak at a time it prevents people from interrupting and makes them conscious not to hog the mic. Async communication? How would you do that? If you have a ques…
I think it really depends on the project size and the kind of work. If you're more in a waterfall model, where the specs are clear and you just got to do it, I can understand how being able to work uninterrupted is a nice-to-have.
But if you work very closely with the business and often run into things that could be done or understood in different ways, having to wait a day or more to get a clarifying response would not work. And this is know-how that can't be written down easily if at all, since a lot of decisions are purely based on experience and historical knowledge.
I used to have this illusionary vision of how everything should be neatly documented, but if you operate on a constantly changing code base, it's really hard to find a good balance. Documentation gets outdated every few weeks and sometimes days, plus most of the time, you don't even know that said documentation has been written. As such, you can't fully trust the documentation and you always have to check out at least part of the code.
What seems to work for me, is documentation that gives a broad overview of a topic and then gives certain pointers into the code. That way you capture the essence of functionality that is likely to remain for a longer time and the transition from documentation to code is made easier.
And finally, if someone is stuck or doesn't understand something, I find it problematic to have the expectation that nobody may be available to read your message for the next few hours or whole day. What is more efficient, someone spending a couple of minutes to provide assistance or someone googling/search Jira/wiki/Confluence for half a day and not making any progress?
Re: Written communication is remote work super power
#76A strength (and weakness) of async is that it comes with a higher expectation of writing quality.
When the expectations are too high, it's likely that people won't get things down in the first place.
My team has noticed an unintuitive approach to communication that seems to work better than alternatives. Write better private notes.
Private notes are low-friction. You know what's worth writing. You don't need to worry as much about if it's a mess.
Our approach is to help you make your private notes a little better organized. And to make it fast to share these notes when they might be helpful to someone else too.
It's bytebase.io. Would love the community's feedback.
Re: Written communication is remote work super power
#77i find that i spend 3x more time explaining something through writing than through a quick chat
Re: Written communication is remote work super power
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recently, I was so frustrated with some folks poor reading comprehension that I was thinking about an imaginary communication system that would allow for decision making where there were some rules: - No responding from mobile devices. The poor response rate is just too high. - The reader is quizzed on the the contents of the communication before they can respond (randomly generated quizzes might be amusing). - The r…
Oh man, I hear you. The amount of sad encounters (especially lately) that I've had as a result of people not understanding what I'm saying because they don't actually read what I wrote are enraging. I almost quit one client over it because their IT guy is the worst. He will decide ahead of time what your email probably says, and that's what he reads into it even if I wrote the opposite. I try to blame myself first fo…
"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."
Re: Written communication is remote work super power
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recently, I was so frustrated with some folks poor reading comprehension that I was thinking about an imaginary communication system that would allow for decision making where there were some rules: - No responding from mobile devices. The poor response rate is just too high. - The reader is quizzed on the the contents of the communication before they can respond (randomly generated quizzes might be amusing). - The r…
Bullets 2 and 3 combined are actually recommended for spoken communications as well. As the listener, before responding, it's a good habit to say "This is what I understand about your proposal" and proceed to summarize and give the original speaker an opportunity to correct you. Probably over half of the communications problems I've seen at work are because people don't follow this basic practice. They respond based…
There's also a subtlety where if you focus too much on what someone said, you might lose why he said it and how it pertains to the situation. I've gotten through some communication problems by focusing on how I understood the person's position, instead of what the arguments he brought forth. When you do that you get this funny situation where it almost seems like each person is participating in different conversations, but at the same time the discussion is progressing effortlessly. I think of it as letting yourself be free to frame and reframe the issue at hand however you like.
Re: Written communication is remote work super power
#80My biggest issue (and it is an issue that has been brought to my attention), is the old "Emperor Joseph" issue:
"Too many words."
I trend prolix. In my essays, this can be corrected by post-edit, but it is not so easy to do that in realtime.